The US vendor Braintree already enables users to make online transactions from their mobile devices but is cautious about its strategy regarding offline payments, in an interview with Mobile World Live.

Around $2 billion of Braintree’s total volume of $8 billion online transactions that the company handles on an annualized basis comes from mobile devices, and it’s the fastest growing part of the process.

But its mobile transactions are all currently online, hence the industry interest in Braintree’s intentions.

“Offline is something that may be interesting at some point to explore but there is so much opportunity in online commerce,” said Aunkur Arya (pictured), the company’s general manager of mobile.

The company has just announced a partnership with Branding Brand, a mobile app developer which works with leading retailers. The deal makes it more likely that Braintree can provide payments within the apps of Branding Brand’s clients, which include many leading retailers.

Such a move prompts the question of whether or not Braintree is interested in a move to handling offline payments for leading retailers since it seems a natural progression, although many such payments, as Arya points out, can be handled via the cloud.

In the future if, as is widely predicted, offline and online payments increasingly merge then surely Braintree must have a foot in the offline world too, since that will be what their clients want?

Arya responds it’s fair to say that some clients may need this kind of seamless strategy. In addition, he points out that it is already working with LevelUp which does handle point-of-sale transactions.

Braintree’s payments system, which is called Venmo Touch, has just come out of beta and is now available to all the vendor’s existing customers. It is only available in the US at present.

The app is currently only available for iOS devices although Arya says an Android version will be coming soon.