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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

PayPal has been annoying some of its customers for years.

Instead of making it easy for folks to pay online using their credit cards, the digital payments company directs them to buy stuff with their PayPal balances and checking accounts. The end result has been both profitable for PayPal (because it avoids credit card networks' higher fees) and a pain for shoppers looking to rack up points or frequent flyer miles.

PayPal is finally changing that, thanks to new deals with Visa and Mastercard it signed earlier this year. On Thursday, PayPal took the chance to tout those agreements, saying its US customers will be able set a default way to pay -- whether credit card, debit card or bank account -- starting this month. The change will be implemented globally beginning early next year.

"We want to make it easy for anyone to pay however they want, wherever they want," Joanna Lambert, a PayPal executive focused on consumer products, said in an interview.

This change is another way PayPal is hoping to make its app and website far more intimate pieces of people's financial lives. Right now, PayPal is something its average customer uses only twice a month; it wants that to increase to twice a week. The Visa and Mastercard agreements could help do that by encouraging more people to use PayPal more often and inviting back many customers who were turned off by its current system.

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