Mobile payments startup launched by co-founder of PayPal

The business will be a rival, and was just opened under the name Affirm.

Co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin, has just announced the launch of a business that will be a direct rival to the mobile payments segment of the company, which will be called Affirm.

This new company will add itself to the rapidly growing and highly competitive smartphone based marketplace.

The technology that is being offered through Affirm is meant to assist shoppers in completing mobile payments more quickly and easily when making purchases online by way of their devices such as smartphones and tablets, says the official website of the company. At the moment, eBay’s PayPal is the online payment leader, but it is facing growing competition from startups that are making their way into the mcommerce space.

Affirm is concentrating on streamlining mobile payments for a far faster checkout process.

The goal of the company is to help to decrease the amount of information that needs to be typed in when making a purchase over a small device such as a smartphone. Entering credit card numbers, shipping addresses, and other data can be time consuming and frustrating when using a very small screen or a touchscreen typing pad.

Affirm has claimed to have reduced the process of making a purchase online so that it involves two simply taps on the screen of a smartphone. The first is to actually choose Affirm on the website of the participating merchant, and the second is to actually confirm the order itself. At the moment, the identity of the user is confirmed through Facebook. Therefore, there will be a third step that must be taken for first time users, which involves having to log in to their Facebook accounts and then giving permission to use the Affirm app.

Levchin was one of PayPal’s two cofounders (Peter Thiel being the other), and held the position of Chief Technology Officer for four years. After that point, the online and mobile payments company was acquired by eBay. It was Levchin who created and constructed the unique and state of the art fraud prevention and online security systems for PayPal.