"No cash, check, card, or phone needed."

That's how eBay (EBAY -0.14%) subsidiary PayPal describes its payment deal with Home Depot (HD -1.77%). And it's no joke: Once you set up your PayPal account to use at stores, a phone number and pin is all that's needed to get your duct tape, fancy new grill, or any of the other thousands of SKUs at Home Depot.

According to Jason Oxman, the CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, PayPal is a paragon of the rising alternative payment technologies. It's an established company, but it's also clearly an innovator. 

In this interview clip from the Transact 14 conference, Oxman explains what makes PayPal so great, and why consumers can feel so comfortable going to Home Depot -- or anywhere else that accepts PayPal -- and using PayPal to complete their transaction.

A transcript follows the video.

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Matt Koppenheffer: When you hear "alternative payment technologies," does something like PayPal fit into there, or is it some gray area in between?

Jason Oxman: PayPal is a great example of a true innovator in the payments space. They have been around for a long time. They're not a new company. They've been around for more than a decade, and they have just brought an incredible amount of innovation; first online, then to mobile, even into the retail space today.

Whenever I go to Home Depot, I pay with PayPal, because I can do it right by entering my phone number.

Koppenheffer: You can do that on Uber now.

Oxman: You know what it is? It's a hands-free mobile payment. I can just type in my phone number -- I don't even need to pull out my phone in order to pay at the point of sale with PayPal.

So, an enormously innovative -- and disruptively innovative; they are really changing the way payments are made in this country, and I think PayPal is a great example of that. I think of PayPal as -- and I think it's great to think of them as -- an alternative provider, because they are so disruptive.

But at the same time, when you make a PayPal transaction, you've got the guarantee behind you of not only PayPal itself, which makes some guarantees to protect consumers and merchants, but also if your PayPal account is attached to your credit card -- it's funded by a credit card -- you've got all the protections of the credit card network as well, so there are a lot of layers of protection there.

Again, we can call that "alternative," because it's a new technology and it's very cool what they're doing, but it's still important to remember that those protections need to be there for consumers.