PayPal CEO On The Blurring Of On/Offline Commerce

If Dan Schulman has his way, PayPal will soon make the transition from Internet payment company to global transaction powerhouse, with a focus on the mobile space.

That’s the gist of an interview Schulman, who recently took the reins as PayPal’s CEO, gave to USA Today that was published Thursday (May 21).

“In the next three to five years, you’ll see a fundamental change in the way payments are done,” Schulman told the paper. “You’ll see the traditional online [payments] world begin to blur with the offline world.”

PayPal will initially seek to carve out a mobile niche. The mobile space now represents about a quarter of the company’s 4 billion transactions conducted annually – and PayPal’s overall transaction volume grew by 68 percent last year to $46 billion. Mobile grew 40 percent in the first quarter of 2015 alone, year over year, Schulman told the audience at the PayPal Commerce: Rewind event, according to TechCrunch.

With an eye on mobile, and a broader platform beyond just being a payments company linked to eBay, PayPal has snapped up Braintree and Paydiant. Those acquisitions in turn led to the debut of the One Touch service, which bypasses the eCommerce inconvenience of passwords.

“That’s a trend that we’re particularly positioned to play a leading role in this,” Schulman told USA Today. “We’ll move from being much more than a payments provider, with a button, and being much more of a full platform company that provides, well, internally we call it the operating system for digital commerce.”

PayPal announced Thursday it would extend OneTouch to work with eCommerce platform Bigcommerce and also work with mobile devices that do not have the PayPal app installed.

USA Today said the CEO alluded to an even broader reach: consumer finance. PayPal could do everything from money orders to cross-border currency activity. “The ability to re-imagine how money can be managed and moved is a big opportunity for us,” he said.