Braintree was founded by Bryan Johnson in 2007. In late 2011, Bill Ready took over as CEO. Less than a year later, Braintree acquired Venmo for $26.2 million. On September 26, 2013, PayPal—then part of eBay—acquired Braintree for $800 million. In August 2015, PayPal acquired Chicago-based mobile commerce company Modest and rolled Modest's products into Braintree's offerings. Braintree announced that they would begin providing services in Australia in November 2012, and expanded into Europe and Canada in August 2013. In mid-2015, Braintree announced support in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. By late 2015, Braintree was processing nearly $50 billion in Authorized Payment Volume, up from $12 billion at the time they were acquired by PayPal in 2013, and had 154 million cards on file, up from 56.5 million.
Products and services
Braintree provides businesses with the ability to accept payments online or within their mobile application. On October 1, 2012, Braintree launched instant signup, streamlining the signup process for US merchants to a few minutes. Braintree announced the v.zero SDK in July 2014. It allows automatic shopping cart integration with PayPal among other payment types. In September 2014, the company announced a partnership with Coinbase to accept Bitcoin. GitHub and ParkWhiz are among the companies that launched with the v.zero SDK, which supports "One Touch Payments". PayPal's mobile also allows One Touch Payments. It does not require those users to create an account on an e-commerce site or enter credit card details every time they want to buy something. The concept of One Touch is based on a prior product called Venmo Touch, which was developed in conjunction with Venmo, the payment service Braintree bought in August 2012. Venmo Touch was the first one-touch mobile buying experience to hit the market.
Integration
Braintree requires some development experience and coding knowledge to integrate. Braintree provides client libraries and integration examples in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java,.NET, and Node JS; mobile libraries for iOS and Android; and Braintree.js for in-browser card encryption. Braintree also works with most of the leading ecommerce and billing platforms—including BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and Wufoo. Braintree abstains from several major business categories such as auctions, tours, gaming, ticketed events and charities, citing the difficulty to underwrite such business models.
Braintree initiated the credit card data portability standard in 2010, which was accepted as an official action group of the DataPortability project. Credit card data portability is supported by an opt-in community of electronic payment processing providers that agree to provide credit card data and associated customer information to an existing merchant upon request in a PCI compliant manner.
