Facebook, Spotify, and Airbnb are among thousands of merchants who may accept Bitcoin after Bitpay’s integration with giant payment processor Adyen.
Payment processing giant Adyen has announced the integration of popular Bitcoin processing platform BitPay into its checkout services. Merchants using Ayden's services will now be able to accept Bitcoin through a single preference check without any further modification of their own site's back-end.
Making the announcement early on February 3 to the International Business Times, BitPay will be hoping to see conversions among some of Adyen's 3,500 merchants globally including, Groupon, Evernote, Facebook, Spotify, Uber, Vodafone, Booking.com, Yelp, AirBnB, KLM, Abercrombie & Fitch, Soundcloud, Ryanair, etc.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at the ICE Totally Gaming Bitcoin conference in London, BitPay's CCO Sonny Singh explained:
“We are delighted to be working with Adyen, whose merchants include Groupon, Facebook, Vodafone, AirBnB and KLM. This partnership means that any of these companies can easily start accepting bitcoin payments without the need for further technical integrations.”
Core Bitcoin coder and BitPay employee Jeff Garzik is reported to have been working behind the scenes for the last month on integrating BitPay's APIs into the Adyen platform. It means Bitcoin has taken another step towards being an easy, and more obvious, payment option for merchants to accept through their existing online systems.
Rather than adopt BitPay as a secondary payment processor that users would need to choose between at the point they check-out from a merchant's website, the integration into Adyen means that the user-flow through that payment process is uninterrupted. Users will instead see it as just one of the possible payments options alongside conventional cards, and online services such as PayPal.
The ease with which users pass through check out is often a key factor in keeping customer purchasing conversions high. Adyen’s Bitcoin integration will therefore keep merchants who are focused on optimizing their customers’ check-out experience happy with the additional payment option.
Adyen's CCO Roelant Prins expanded on the deal whilst speaking to the International Business Times, aligning the deal with BitPay to the company's aim of providing a comprehensive range of options for merchants:
"As a business focused on merchant needs, we are excited to give merchants the ability to securely accept bitcoin payments, alongside over 250 payment methods and 187 transaction currencies that we currently offer."
Processing over US$25 billion in 2014, the Dutch firm Adyen provides checkout and integrated payment services to a number of world renowned brands. UK-based Runescape developer and game studio Jagex is the first of Adyen's customers to accept Bitcoin payments through the payment service with the option being turned on as the announcement was made.
David Parrott, Payment Services Director at Jagex, commented on the news of accepting Bitcoin:
“An advantage of bitcoin is that it is still new and shiny enough to generate interest in the payment experience simply through the fact that it exists. There are people with investment in the system looking for new and cool places to spend their cash. As a business that operates on a freemium model - where the payment process needs to be compelling enough to convert cost free customers into paying ones - not having a barrier to entry for bitcoin users makes sense.”
Bitpay itself recently announced that the company processed payments for 53,738, (53 %) of the 100,000 merchants globally believed to be accepting cryptocurrencies. The company's integration with Adyen will keep the pace high for the startup who in 2014 raised an at-the-time record US$30 million in Series A funding.
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