PayPal acquires carrier billing capability via Zong

PayPal recently announced that their parent company, eBay, is acquiring Zong (@zong).  Once the deal closes, Zong will become a part of PayPal.

Zong provides a mobile payments system that bills consumers via their mobile phone carrier bills.  This Zong screencast shows you how the system works (if the YouTube embed below isn’t working for you, click here to go directly to the video).

Zong CEO and founder David Marcus (@davidmarcus) had this to say in his announcement of the acquisition on the Zong blog:

I am so excited by the unique combination of PayPal’s 8 million merchants, brand power, risk management expertise, and financial stability, with Zong’s Carrier DNA, its largest direct carrier payments network, product innovation, and best-in-class carrier billing technology. This industry first is going to allow us to scale what we’ve built over the course of the past 3 years (and then some) in a massive way!

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including a discussion of why this acquisition matters for PayPal, PayPal merchants, and PayPal X Platform developers.