On Monday, PayPal announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Paydiant Inc., a mobile payments company that provides technology that enables retailers to create their own branded mobile wallets. While PayPal has not disclosed the deal value, anonymous sources have told Re/code that the eBay payment unit will fork over in the region of $280 million for the Wellesley, Massachusetts-based startup.

Paydiant’s white label platform enables merchants and banks to integrate mobile payments, offers and loyalty into their own branded mobile app. Among the company’s clients are fast food chain, Subway (Doctor’s Associates Inc.) and Capital One Financial Corporation, a U.S.-based bank holding company.

Most notable among its clients, is Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a joint venture between a group of large U.S. retailers led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to bring to market CurrentC, a merchant-owned mobile payment system. Other members include Target, Sears, Wendy’s, Exxon and CVS, to name a few. CurrentC is due for release later this year.

PayPal hopes that the acquisition will help it become a popular payment option in brick-and-mortar retailers, something the company has struggled with to date.

“Using Paydiant’s platform, our merchant partners can now create their own branded wallets to accelerate mobile-in-store payments and drive consumer engagement through mobile payments, loyalty, offers and the prioritization of preferred payment types, such as store branded credit cards and gift cards,” wrote Dan Schulman, PayPal president in a blog post.

Similar to rival offerings from Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd., Paydient’s technology makes use of Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, but the platform is “technology agnostic”, and therefore merchants can also create mobile wallets that work via Quick Response (QR) codes and that do not require specific hardware or mobile operating systems.

Apple’s Apple Pay, launched in September, sparked renewed interest in mobile payments services. In just the last few weeks, we have seen the launch of Samsung Pay and Google has acquired technology from Softcard to improve its Google Wallet offering. The Google-Softcard deal will also see Google Wallet come preinstalled on Android devices sold via AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Google has also announced the availability of its Android Pay API which will allow third-party app developers to add mobile payments to their Android apps.

PayPal’s acquisition of Paydiant is expected to be finalized later in March or early-April.

Image via PayPal