PayPal vault storage - sending credit card info securely

Question

I am evaluating some Payment Gateway options and am looking at PayPal's vault option (similar to Braintree's vault).

What I found is that in the case of Braintree's vault storage, I can send credit card info securely (encrypted) to be stored on their servers, thus obviating the necessity of PCI compliancy issues.

Does PayPal's vault storage API have a similar way of sending the encrypted credit card info? I am looking at their documentation and it seems as though I need to send un-encrypted data to their vault.

Am I wrong in making this assumption? I would be very much interested as this will make me discard Paypal and go with Braintree as our Payment Gateway Service.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on which PayPal service you specifically are wanting to use, both PayPal and Payflow have a similar service. You can find information on PayPal's Vault on PayPal's Developer site. If you are wanting to use Payflow, you can have Payflow store the customers credit card information. Have a look at the Payflow Gateway Developers Guide. Page 76 has information on the Data Upload feature.