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Comment by cesarpereira | Hacker News Reader

Both (leaning more heavily towards bad)

Bad: Paypal as a potential suitor will make some existing and potential customers very nervous and that won't be good for customer acquisition. Other potential suitors may see other heavyweights passing on the deal as a negative.

Good: The attention may increase the pool of suitors.

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Exactly. We process over $1M a year with Braintree (that's why I posted this article). In my opinion, PayPal is the worst possible scenario short of Braintree shutting down.

The thought of forcing thousands of customers to re-enter billing information makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

Why do you think that would be the case? That did not happen with Payflow and PayPal mgmt is quite a bit better now (the CEO mainly).

Nothing would be required of customers. They'd migrate the data over to Paypal's setup in such a scenario. Card data is stored with a symmetric encryption algorithm (e.g. reversible), so this type of thing could happen fairly easily.

Contact Braintree if you're concerned. There are processes in place where they can transfer payment information (including credit cards stored for recurring billing purposes) to another payment gateway.

Isn't supposed to be easy to move the card details from the vault to other provider?

I would agree with the "bad" assessment. If I had accounts at BrainTree, I would be very worried about PayPal as a suitor. Ostensibly a fair percentage elected to use BrainTree because there were Not PayPal. I presently steer clients away from PayPal, and had previously recommended BrainTree. This casts doubt on that going forward.

This would be similar to Oracle acquiring MySQL.

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