“To some, the collaboration may be somewhat surprising, given PayPal’s increasing incursions into the mobile payments market, which have made the service a kind of rival against Samsung Pay and other emerging mCommerce solutions.”

Samsung has added PayPal as a payment option in its Samsung Pay mobile payments platform. The integration takes effect immediately for US users, and will soon be expanded to additional markets.

That’s good news for PayPal, which should be able to take a certain share of transaction fees through Samsung Pay payments. But it also offers a couple of benefits to Samsung. Some users will appreciate being able to select PayPal as their payment option; and Samsung Pay is now being supported in BrainTree Direct, PayPal’s payments service for online merchants, which means more merchants will be able to accept Samsung’s mobile payments.

To some, the collaboration may be somewhat surprising, given PayPal’s increasing incursions into the mobile payments market, which have made the service a kind of rival against Samsung Pay and other emerging mCommerce solutions. But in a statement announcing the partnership, Samsung CTO Injong Rhee suggested that it’s an example of Samsung’s “open model of partnership and collaboration, which helps us deliver the best experiences to our customers.”

Much the same can be said of PayPal, which entered into a similar partnership with Google’s Android Pay mobile payments service earlier this year.