In November 2012, we announced that Braintree was expanding to APAC, with our Sydney, Australia office leading the charge. At the time, traditional ecommerce was growing at lightning speed, but mobile was such a nascent concept that it seemed unimaginable. Thanks to our early bet on mobile, we were fortunate enough to partner with innovative companies like Airbnb, in addition to some of Australia’s largest brands including Belong, The Iconic, and JB Hifi.
Five years later, we’re proud to have successfully grown to over 40 markets including New Zealand, accept more than 130 currencies, and continue to power innovative experiences for some of the largest mobile-first businesses in Australia and around the world.
We’ve seen offline go online and online go mobile and now, we’re powering experiences like Guzman y Gomez’s mobile app experience by allowing its traditionally bricks-and-mortar customers to accept Apple Pay within their app. We’ve also seen Australian mcommerce explode in the last couple of years with 48% of Australian smartphone users shopping on mobile at least once a week and 72% of Australians using mobile devices for payments.1 We also saw an uptick in on-demand services, from ordering a taxi five years ago to ordering everything from clothing, to food, to beauty services within hours, or even minutes, at a simple click of a button today.
During this time, we also made the decision to join the PayPal family. We knew that our technology coupled with PayPal’s international reach and trusted brand reputation would allow us to create the platform that would eventually transform the way people transact online and on mobile. We also knew that, together, we’d be able to offer even greater incomparable commerce experiences for customers around the world.
This month, we are celebrating our five-year anniversary, and there are few milestones that we’re especially proud of:
- Crossing 1 billion global transactions quarterly as a company.
- Making Apple Pay and Android Pay available to our merchants in Australia and announcing that leading Australian taqueria chain and Braintree merchant, Guzman y Gomez, was one of the first to integrate. Today, we enable merchants to accept the most popular forms of payments in one single, easy integration including PayPal, Apple Pay, Apple Pay on the Web, Pay with Google, and credit/debit cards.
- Watching our merchants grow with us. The success of our merchants has always been a primary driving force for us. Over the years we saw merchants like Harris Farm Markets partner with us to offer greater choice and security at checkout for their customers, while Marketplacer saw their business become more seamless, which in turn increased physical transactions on site by 300-400% year over year.2
- Helping merchants expand internationally including AussieBum, HiSmile, Hearne, Zimmermann, Cue, Loving Tan, BNKR, One Teaspoon, Jayride, Cycling Express, Camilla, Sass & Bide, Institchu, Zanerobe and HotelQuickly -- who we have worked with since 2013.
As we look back on our last five years, we are so proud of the growth and success that we’ve seen -- most importantly by our merchants -- in Australia. We would not be here today without the trust that our merchants have placed in us over the years and we love seeing them scale and succeed in different ways. There is a lot more for us to do but we’re excited to see what the future holds for us and can’t wait to continue to move the future of Australian commerce forward.