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PayPal
BACKGROUND
After running AT&T’s consumer business by age 39 and launching Priceline and Virgin Mobile USA, Dan Schulman came to PayPal from being President of Enterprise Growth at American Express. Schulman's tenure oversaw PayPal’s spin-off from its parent company eBay.
-revenue grew at 20% on an FX neutral basis
-$3.14 billion of quarterly revenue
-6.5 million net new active users
-210 million people on the platform; 17 million merchants and almost 200 million consumers.
What is their overall market strategy?
Schulman puts strong emphasis on peer-to-peer payments through PayPal's subsidiary Venmo and PayPal.me. Schulman characterizes peer-to-peer payments as a $100 trillion market where 85% of the transactions are still conducted in cash. Venmo’s transaction value more than doubled in Q2 2017 to $8 billion.
Even before he took over as CEO, Schulman saw the emergence of commerce over mobile devices. “The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing,” Schulman said shortly after taking over as PayPal CEO.
PayPal seeks to increase market share in brick-and-mortar stores through point-of-sale product PayPal Here and integrating the ability to pay at brick-and-mortar stores using a mobile device, competing with products such as Square and Stripe.
Schulman has indicated that PayPal will focus on scale over revenue through strategic partnerships with Visa, MasterCard and even companies once considered rivals in the payments space like Google and Apple.
What have been their wins and losses as a company?
In its core website payments business, PayPal enjoys a staggering 91% market share. PayPal is enjoying an expansion in both revenues and new business, and its Venmo peer-to-peer subsidiary doubled its year-over-year payment volume in 2017.
In February 2018, PayPal settled an FTC complaint that it failed to disclose privacy terms and funds availability adequately to Venmo account holders.
In 2015, PayPal agreed to pay a $25 million fine in a CFPB complaint that alleged its “Bill Me Later” service signed up customers for credit lines without their knowledge. PayPal made no claim of innocence or guilt as part of the settlement.
What perception do they have, and how do they promote themselves?
From its inception, PayPal had a strong desire to be seen as more than the payment button on a website.
CEO Schulman is quoted as saying, “One of the things that I learned at American Express is that there's a saying that it's expensive to be poor and that was especially true in financial services, that around the world, there are 2 billion people who are outside the traditional financial-services industry, in the US maybe 70 million or so are underserved. There's a real powerful way that technology can democratize financial services. It can make the managing and moving of money a right for all citizens and not just a privilege for the affluent.”
From the standpoint of consumer perception, PayPal maintains an "A" rating with the Better Business Bureau. BBB has received 7,327 total closed customer complaints, or 0.00003% of PayPal's estimated 210 million customers (7327/210,000,000). The complaints are categorized by the BBB as follows:
Advertising / Sales Issues 516
Billing / Collection Issues 1731
Delivery Issues 143
Guarantee / Warranty Issues 206
Problems with Product / Service 4731
What sort of company image do they promote and how do they project it?
PayPal’s mission statement is to “Build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
As part of its efforts to position itself as more than a payment solution for websites, PayPal recently launched a new ad campaign through CP+B Agency with the tagline "PayPal Can Do That", with comic vignettes that demonstrate additional benefits of using PayPal for purchases.