According to breaking news reports that have appeared in the last few hours on Reuters and on the Wall Street Journal, Google is likely planning to become your next PayPal.

PayPal is the most popular digital payment system available online (over 70 million accounts can send money via the Internet in 45 countries), recently acquired by auctions clearinghouse eBay.com.

PayPal allows consumers to pay for purchases directly on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or bank checking accounts.

Google plans may in fact include the creation of an electronic-payment service that could help the company expand and diversify its thriving business, made up for the greatest part by the profit returned by its advertising services (Google AdWords and AdSense).

Apparently, the Google future payment service has been codenamed Google Wallet, and it will provide Google customers and with a possibly major new chunk of extra revenue money, coming both from the saved fees Google is now paying to banks and delivery services to distribute its payments to advertisers and publishers as well as from the commission fees it will leverage from individual people transactions.

eBay's PayPal service is already on the path to generate nearly a billion dollars in revenue this year.

Google has offered a hint that it might set up an online-payment service. Its Web site says the company will eventually allow consumers to pay to view videos online. But Google to date has not provided any details of any payment-service plans. Google currently accepts credit-card payments for some services, including advertisements and customized research.

The rumors of Google being serious about taking on such a wide-reaching business opportunity escalated after a panel discussion at a Piper Jaffray Internet conference which took place last Thursday. During that event, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting firm in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, told the audience that the Google service could be launched very soon.

Beyond pure extra income, the Google Wallet may provide the Mountain View search giant with extra strategic marketing and business information related to how its present advertising customers would be spending their money. Google might in fact be able to start tracking and monitoring how those Web users who click on Google-managed ads go about spending their money and whether or not they spend it on the products and services offered by those very same advertisers.

Google has denied so far to make any comments on this story.