Dive Brief:

• Digital payments provider PayPal Holdings and tech titan Google have inked a deal that allows both of them to benefit from new commercial ties, with PayPal and its Venmo peer-to-peer unit providing checkout services for more Google services, according to a Wednesday press release from PayPal.
• Meanwhile, PayPal will tap Google’s cloud computing power to “reimagine its technology foundations, applications, and infrastructure to power PayPal’s next-generation commerce and payments platform,” according the release.
• The companies are also more closely collaborating on agentic commerce in the hopes of creating standards that will shape the emerging bot-driven shopping and purchasing landscape, PayPal said.  

Dive Insight:

PayPal’s decision to hire Google to create its next-generation platform dovetails with the payments player’s disclosure earlier this year that it was embarking on a $300 million “large-scale initiative” to overhaul its technology infrastructure. That effort is expected to occur over the next few years.

Earlier this week, Google said it was working on a technical protocol for transactions made by agentic artificial intelligence, working with PayPal, among other companies, on e-commerce experiences driven by AI agents that will be authorized to shop and purchase on behalf of consumers. San Jose, California-based PayPal’s latest release explained how the companies will knit together their efforts in the AI arena.

“The partnership will bring together PayPal's global payment infrastructure, data-driven personalization and trusted identity solutions, alongside Google's AI expertise to deliver new AI experiences,” PayPal’s Wednesday release said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

PayPal wins new business as part of the partnership by becoming “one of the key payment providers processing card payments” across Google’s platforms, including for advertising and gaming, the release said. Its payments technology will also be more broadly embedded in Google’s products.

“We're excited to expand our work together to make online transactions simpler and more secure,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in the release. “Through this partnership, PayPal will use our industry-leading AI to enhance services and security, and we will more deeply integrate PayPal’s innovative payment capabilities for a better experience across Google products and platforms.”