Online payment services company PayPal has continued its massive expansion in 2020 by integrating cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer into its payment platform.
While it was already one of the biggest online payment platforms around, the massive increase in people working and conducting business over the internet from home in 2020 has caused the company to grow at a phenomenal rate this year. And, being the forward-thinking company it is, instead of sitting back and enjoying the success, PayPal has got on the front foot and used the unexpected boost to explore new options and improve its technologies.
During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, CFO John Rainey revealed bold plans to spend $300-million more than was initially budgeted on building, acquiring and improving new products, and they certainly followed through. According to CEO Dan Schulman, the number of new products already rolled out in just the second half of 2020 is equal to the number of new products released for the past six years combined.
With the increase in products at its disposal, PayPal has equally increased its presence in several industries. Even in e-commerce, its bread and butter, the company has been innovating with the introduction of the Honey extension, which allows users to find good deals on PayPal easily. PayPal is also used in industries like iGaming as it enables users to securely make deposits to trusted casino sites that are using PayPal. With over 300 million consumer accounts, and 22 million merchants using PayPal, its spot at the top of the online payment world is indisputable.
One of the intriguing things about many of PayPal’s new products is that they are not directly monetised and may even be listed on a balance sheet as liabilities. Pay in 4, for example, allows people to pay for something in four separate payments while accruing zero interest and the merchant does not pay for it either. There is zero additional profit here for PayPal, but the company sees the benefit in offering as much value to its users as possible.
Of course, one of those new products is the integration of bitFlyer. The integration will allow millions of European citizens easy access to trading various cryptocurrencies by being able to add money to their bitFlyer Europe accounts directly through PayPal. After the explosion in popularity of cryptocurrency trading in late 2017 and early 2018, some negative press – like the shuttering of several leading exchange platforms– led to suggestions it was overly risky or unsafe to do so, and this integration will go a long way towards easing potential new traders’ fears. This is great business for a variety of reasons, the most important of which being customer goodwill.
Another huge advantage to this union is that, previously, the primary method for adding funds to a bitFlyer account was via traditional methods that could take up to three business days to clear. Those familiar with the cryptocurrency market will know, three days of not being able to access funds might as well be a year so much can happen. So, the immediacy of a PayPal to bitFlyer transfer will be incredibly attractive to traders.
It has been a fairly meteoric rise for bitFlyer Europe, which only opened its doors in January 2018 amid the cryptocurrency boom surrounded by plenty of competitors that had the same idea. However, it wasn’t a complete shot out of the dark and was a household name in Japanese cryptocurrency trading before expanding into Europe. Going back to the controversy of that boom, another feather in the cap of bitFlyer is that they are listed as one of only ten exchanges that haven’t been caught artificially inflating trading volumes.
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