PayPal has agreed to buy European financial-technology startup iZettle for about $2.2bn, a move that would catapult the US digital-payments giant into hundreds of thousands of brick-and-mortar retailers around the world, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The acquisition, the largest in PayPal’s history, sets up a showdown between the San Jose, California, company and Jack Dorsey’s Square, which has built a big payments business catering to coffee shops, flea-market vendors and millions of other small businesses with physical locations that PayPal historically overlooked.