PayPal's not just focusing on merchant services these days. The company announced it is teaming with regional bank The Bancorp Bank to provide a person-to-person solution allowing the bank's customers to send and receive funds using PayPal's platform.

It's not quite a white label solution, as customers will need PayPal accounts to access the services, but Bancorp is offering Paypal's Instant Account Creation to make it easy to open a PayPal account directly from a Bancorp account. That's the first U.S. integration of that tool, Bancorp said.

"PayPal believes that innovation will drive success for the financial services industry and enjoys working with financial institutions like The Bancorp Bank that are always looking for great products and solutions to bring to their customers," said Dan Schatt, head of financial innovations at PayPal.

And while it isn't strictly a mobile payment solution, the companies said they have a series of collaborations to announce this year. (And PayPal account holders will have a simpler way to tie in Bancorp accounts to fund P2P payments through PayPal's mobile app.)

So the upshot seems to be that PayPal is reaching out to FIs to create new P2P channels; it's another competitor providing smaller FIs with the ability to offer P2P payments to customers. Plus, it helps alleviate one issue of using PayPal, namely the process of having to link and verify an account in order to make a payment.

"We saw the market opportunity in P2P payment services and the benefits it could bring to our affinity customers and now we have the right partner," said Pete Chiccino, Bancorp’s executive VP and chief innovations officer.

For more information, visit the money transfer/P2P research center.