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PayPal partners with Vancouver startup Control for mobile app

A B.C. tech startup is partnering with PayPal to create a mobile app geared not toward consumers, but merchants who want to monitor online payments remotely.
kathryn_loewen_control
Kathryn Loewen, CEO of Vancouver-based startup Control, which produces an app that allows merchants to monitor payments in real time | Chung Chow   

A B.C. tech startup is partnering with PayPal to create a mobile app geared not toward consumers, but merchants who want to monitor online payments remotely.

Vancouver-based Control announced Thursday (August 20) merchants can now sign up for a beta version of the app, which allows users to monitor PayPal payments in real time over mobile devices and respond to suspicious activity.

CEO Kathryn Loewen told Business In Vancouver PayPal has been a leader at offering consumer-facing apps focused on peer-to-peer payments.

“But where I felt there was a gap was in building B2B (business-to-business) tools, building management tools specifically for the merchant,” she said.

“These merchants crave mobility as much as their consumers do and I didn’t see any apps in PayPal that would support these particular use cases.”

Loewen said Control will be responding to user feedback throughout the beta-version testing and the company expects to have the official launch version ready in the next six to eight weeks.

Kevin Zemnickis, PayPal Canada’s mobile business development manager, said in a statement he was looking forward to working with the startup.

“Through this collaboration, more than 250,000 of our small business customers can track and interpret their payments in real-time and make better business decisions with Control’s analytics and payments monitoring tools,” he said.

In June, Control announced it had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors including Vanedge Capital and BDC Capital.

The company currently has about a dozen employees and Loewen told BIV at the time she was looking to hire more employees to keep pace with its growing userbase.

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