PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, “We Have A Lot Of Work Ahead Of Us”
TECHCRUNCH: Digital commerce company PayPal is moving to establish itself as “more than just a button” to a global payments platform as it readies a split from parent company eBay later this year. “We’re coming into the market at a time when the financial services industry is going through some fundamental shifts,” new PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said at PayPal’s Commerce: Rewind event today. “We’re really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.”
A big part of that shift is how consumers are starting to use mobile technology to make purchases.
“The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing,” Schulman said. PayPal has 165 million active consumers globally. One in three transactions through PayPal is now through a mobile device, according to Shulman.
Schulman believes PayPal can be a leader during this transition with mobile payments. “I can see us having more mobile transactions than we do through desktop,” he said.
The payments industry is very hot at the moment, propped up by the payment capabilities on smartphones and watches. Schulman mentioned that more than 1 billion transactions were made on mobile in the first quarter of 2015 and that mobile volume had grown 40 percent year-over-year.
Much of this is driven by a global mass adoption of mobile. More than 2 billion people around the world are expected to have a smartphone by 2016, according to the latest figures from eMarketer.
The event is a move to establish PayPal as more than a payments platform powered by eBay. PayPal announced last week that it would go public on the Nasdaq as “PYPL,” its original ticker symbol before eBay acquired it. The company plans to spin off from parent company eBay later this year and will go public after that.
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