Braintree, an online payments tech company that put its roots down in Chicago in 2007, just announced that it will add 150 jobs to their West Loop headquarters. Over the next two years or so, that office will triple in size–a change that would allow Braintree to take the lead in the payments space.

According to company CEO Bill Ready, there are two macrotrends ruling online payments today. The first is using a cloud-based infrastructure, which not only decreases the cost of starting up and maintaining a mobile or online business, it also gives devs the chance to build products instead of serving as maintenance people. “Payments is the last piece of major infrastructure that has not moved,” says Ready.

Mobile commerce–the growth of it, specifically–is the other trend on everyone’s tongues these days. With one in five ecommerce transactions taking place on a mobile device, the opportunity to capture inevitable growth in this space is huge. Today, Braintree processes nearly $1 billion in mobile volume annually.

Why is this so important? According to Ready, his company is trying to build something that would transform the mobile payments ecosystem. “Braintree’s goal is to build a payment platform that developers can easily build on top of, similar to what iOS did for mobile apps,” Ready says. “In payments today, there is still a confusing backend. We are building the tools that will allow developers to innovate on top of our payment platform.”

Read more at Built In Chicago.