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PayPal: Did You Know?

Thursday, August 2, 2018

These days there are probably not too many people around who haven't at least heard of PayPal. Although, I guess I'm mainly talking about younger generation, a number of people over 60 might not have found a use for it yet. But PayPal is the leading online payment system founded back in 1998.



Who created it?

Well, you might either love PayPal because of its ease and speed of transactions, or you might hate PayPal because of its enormous fees, but chances are that you kind of love at least one of the guys behind PayPal - Elon Musk. Other founders are Yu Pan, MaxLevchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery. Musk was ousted from the company though when he wanted to move everything from Unix to Microsoft.

Numbers?

Right now in 2018 PayPal has 244 million active user accounts. In second quarter of 2018 there were 2.3 billion transactions totaling 140 billion in payments. PayPal's revenue? $3.86 billion. Net income around $1.795 billion. And the company has around 18,700 employees.

Not right?

PayPal has also managed to get something really wrong during its good run. In 2013 they accidentally credited $92 quadrillion to one account. If PayPal hadn't removed the "money" from the account, the man from Pensylvania said that he would have probably paid down the national debt.

The worst?

In 1999 PayPal was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas. Well, considering they initially gave $20 to everyone who opened an account with them as well as $20 for every referral, I can see why one could see them as the worst company. But then again, this also meant that this 60-70 million dollars they had to spend on it gave them 100 000 customers from day one.

Paying in stores?

While PayPal is mainly an online payment system, nowadays there are also a number of stores with in-store PayPal payments and more are coming soon. Additionally, one can now also participate in PayPal betting, in some countries users can have PayPal debit card, and so on. I remember a friend of mine mentioning me a while back that a homeless person once came to him asking for some change. He didn't have anything on him and the ATM was far away. And then the man asked - do you have a PayPal account? My friend said yes, he did, after which the man took out a PayPal payment system (or however it's called) from his pocket. Welcome to the new world.

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting! I use Paypal whenever I can if I am shopping online - I feel more secure using it.

    ReplyDelete

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