PayPal Boosts Venture Team With Wells Fargo Exec

Peggy Mangot, who once led the development of the Wells Fargo mobile banking app Greenhouse, has been hired by online payments giant PayPal as part of the company’s internal ventures team, PayPal Ventures, CNBC reported.

Mangot worked as Wells Fargo’s senior vice president in the development of Greenhouse, which works to help younger users and gig economy workers develop responsible banking habits, CNBC reported. And in the past, she founded SparkGift, a micro-investing startup, and was head of a team for payments and commerce partnerships at Google.

Now, she’ll serve as an operating partner for PayPal Ventures, meaning she’ll likely act as a liaison for portfolio companies, working to boost the value of startups.

PayPal Ventures is focused on early-round ventures in FinTech startups which have some relevance to the company’s interests. Some of the previous portfolio companies have included investing app Acorns, retail returns service Happy Returns, and Monese, a European digital bank.

Greenhouse, the app developed by Mangot and her team at Wells Fargo, is somewhat akin to a J.P. Morgan Chase app called Finn in that it competed with the company’s main retail bank business in some ways. Wells Fargo stopped accepting new applications for it last month.

PayPal spun off from eBay in 2015 and has been doing well for itself through the pandemic, with record-high quarterly numbers. PYMNTS reported that the diminished expectations due to the economy’s withered state made it easy for PayPal to beat analysts’ predictions in the second quarter, with revenue increasing year on year to $5.26 billion from a previous $4.31 billion.

CEO and President Dan Schulman said Q2 was the company’s strongest ever, adding people would likely adopt PayPal’s digital payment strategies in their lives from now on.

In keeping with the modern social distancing norms, PayPal has also announced plans for a new contactless, QR code-based form of payment, so as to truly get away from things like card-swiping or signatures.