Hill Ferguson, SVP, Chief Product Officer, PayPal
The move from Palm Pilots to email payments was PayPal’s first pivot and it helped change the nature of ecommerce, by providing a quick and easy way for people like you and me to pay and get paid safely and securely over the Internet. PayPal was such a successful product that we renamed the company after it in June 2001 and we have continued to adapt to help take advantage of upcoming opportunities ever since.
Although I’ve only been with PayPal for three years, I speak on behalf of the company when I say that it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come. Since 1999, PayPal has weathered the dot.com bust, seen technology come and go, and broken new ground in the fight against cybercrime. As a global leader, serving 203 markets around the world and accepting payments in more than 100 different currencies, we’re again seeing the landscape of payments and commerce shift.
It’s ironic, yet fitting, that the first PayPal transactions occurred on Palm Pilots, which are now defunct. That the very platform we built our first business on is extinct, but we’re still growing.
And its because of the crucial driver of our success: the ability to pivot, evolve, and adapt to huge changes in the industry – whether a new handheld device (or highly competitive category of them), an economic downturn, or even a new currency (yes, the Euro was not yet widely adopted when PayPal launched).
A few examples of key turns:
2006, as infatuation with cellphones grew, we let people pay by SMS, well in advance of the advent of the iPhone® (though we were there in the first App Store®, too…) 2008, as the economy softened, we launched the PayPal Student Account, to ease tension between parents and teens around money exchange, while giving teens the chance to learn good spending habits and experience being responsible… a fancy way of saying that even back then, we were powering the People Economy in the way our customers needed us most. In 2009, we were the first to open up our global platform to allow third party developers to build secure, reliable payments directly into their apps. In 2010 we fed the public’s love of Facebook by becoming a payment option for Facebook Credits. And in 2012, we launched the first cloud-based in-store payments capabilities with the Home Depot.
Every company has a corporate DNA and for us it is payments. Making payments work at scale takes great technology combined with the highest security standards and customer support. We are the world’s most trusted digital wallet because we give people the flexibility to pay in hundreds of different ways.
Yes, we’ve come a long way in fifteen years. But we’re not done evolving and we’re not done innovating. 58 product experiences in 2013 and we have already surpassed that number this year. In the last 12 months, we acquired Braintree, the leading mobile payment platform, launched fingerprint authentication for payments with Samsung and announced our affiliation with Bitcoin. And, as we welcome Dan Schulman as PayPal’s new president, we’re excited to capitalize even further on our growth opportunities that set us up for the future
Who knows whether biometrics will be as commonplace in 15 years as mobile is today, or if it’ll have fallen by the wayside; or if mobile phones will still dominate our computing or have been replaced by wearables or some other as yet undreamed of technology. We don’t. But we do know we’re the payments company that developers, merchants and customers alike – the whole world over – can trust to ferry them securely and simply through.
Check out our amazing webpage dedicated to our first 15 years of innovation at www.paypal.com/15years
…and here’s to the next 15!