PayPal To List On Nasdaq Under PYPL Ticker After eBay Spinoff

TECHCRUNCH: Payments company PayPal is inching closer to spinning off from its marketplace parent eBay. Today its designated CEO, Dan Schulman, announced that it plans to list on Nasdaq and use PYPL as its ticker — the original ticker it used before eBay acquired it in 2002.

The  company plans to spin off eBay in the second half of this year. To date, some 18 billion transactions and over $1 trillion in payments have passed through its platform, and it now has 165 million consumers in 200 countries.

While PayPal blazed a trail for online payments when it first launched in 1998, today the company faces a lot of competition, from traditional payment providers like banks and credit companies through to other large new entrants like Apple and newer startups like Stripe. Unsurprisingly, Schulman is therefore highlighting his company’s legacy in the space.

“This is a meaningful symbol for the company because it represents our unbroken commitment to the spirit of the original vision that the sparked the launch of PayPal 17 years ago,” he writes.

Since eBay announced in September 2014 that PayPal would be separating from eBay, PayPal has been making some strategic acquisitions and rolling out new products to build out its own standalone business, or as Schulman describes it, “to create the operating system for a world in which all commerce is digital commerce.” This has included adding bitcoin payments, new one-touch payments coming to the web (announced in April 2015) and buying mobile wallet Paydiant.

It had already been carving out a position for itself as a payments provider outside of eBay, touching both online merchants and others who need to take payments as well as consumers and businesses that need to make payments, but its current owner still accounts for a very large portion of the business that passes through PayPal (and will continue to do so even after the spinoff).