PayPal, undoubtedly, is one of the widely used payment systems across the globe. Most of the online shoppers use this payment system to buy the products online. One of the major reasons behind its widespread popularity is the enhanced security and money transferring convenience it offers.
Wondering how this platform actually came into existence and reached the current popularity level it enjoys? You will find your answers in this post. Continue reading!
It was established and launched in December 1988 by Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Peter Thiel. At that time, it was known as Confinity. It was established as a security software developer for handheld devices. It started its money transfer services in 1999. John Malloy from BlueRun Ventures funded the company so that it could be turned into a money transferring platform.
The year 2000 witnessed a merger of PayPal, then Confinity, with X.com. The latter is an online banking company. Elon Musk was at the helm of establishing that company. In the same year, X.com closed its prime business and put its turned its complete focus on the services money transfer serving Confinity was offering as Musk saw great potential in this business. After this announcement, Peter Thiel replaced Musk as the CEO of X.com and in the year 2001 the company was rebranded and it got its new name, PayPal.
The company was made public in 2002 and got immense popularity immediately so much that it generated a revenue of over $61 million. eBay, a huge popular e-commerce platform, acquired PayPal in the year 2002. The acquisition value was $1.5 billion. PayPal then became the default payment system for eBay. This resulted in a wide use of this money transfer system.
In the year 2005, a payment service VeriSign was acquired by PayPal. The main objective of this acquisition was to make PayPal more secure for its users so it could be used by more e-commerce platforms.
As seen in the Rochester magazine, 2007 is another prominent year in the history of PayPal due to its partnership with MasterCard. This helped PayPal to grow its business as users could still use PayPal for making payments even if a website did not have the PayPal infrastructure but supported MasterCard.
In the same year, the use of PayPal grew further as its operations were expanded to Luxembourg. This helped the company to make its presence felt in EU market.
Other acquisitions by PayPal during the year 2008 to 2013 include Fraud Sciences (2008), Bill Me Later (2008), Zong (2011), IronPearl (2013), and Braintree (2013). The company also partnered with Discover Card in the year 2012.
In the year 2014, an announcement was made that eBay will split from PayPal and continue offering its services as a separate business entity. The whole process of splitting eBay from PayPal was finalized on 18th of July, 2015.
In the recent developments, PayPal has acquired Xoom Corporations (2015), Modest Incand (2015), TIO Networks (2017), Swift Financial (2017), iZettle (2018), Hyperwallet (2018), and Simility (2018).