Today at PayPal, we celebrate our listing day and mark a new beginning as an independent, publicly traded company. It’s a day filled with exciting possibilities and deep meaning for all of us here at PayPal.
Revolutionizing Digital Commerce
We embark on this new chapter with great confidence in our future. We’ve entered a time of unprecedented change that will revolutionize the role that money plays in people’s lives. Right now, every aspect of commerce is being rewired on a global basis. The convergence of mobile technology and cloud computing is unleashing incredible opportunities to transform how people move and manage money, and how merchants and consumers interact and transact. Our company has a leading position to deliver the benefits of this transformation.
We look back with great pride as well. In 1998, PayPal was a driving force behind the rapid adoption of e-commerce by pioneering a safe and convenient way to send money via email. Four years later, we went public under the stock ticker symbol PYPL. Now after more than 12 years as a part of the eBay family, we’re thrilled to be publicly traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange once again under our original stock ticker. As we mark our start as an independent company, we wish our friends and colleagues at eBay nothing but the best in the future.
PYPL is a meaningful symbol for PayPal. It signifies our unbroken commitment to the original vision that sparked the launch of this company. It represents our vast global payment network and our worldwide community of consumers, merchants and developers. It stands for our heritage as an innovator in digital payments – everything we do to make financial transactions easier, faster and more affordable.
Our Opportunity is Enormous
Now, as we move forward as an independent company, our opportunities have never been greater.
We operate in the fast-growing online and mobile segments of digital payments, which combined form a $2.5 trillion e-commerce market*. But our real potential is many times larger. Together, buying online and shopping in stores create a world of commerce worth $25 trillion*. As we move into an era when mobile experiences will erase the distinction between the two, it is this much larger market that we see as PayPal’s true opportunity.
Transforming the Way People Move and Manage their Money
The path ahead for PayPal is clear. It begins with what we’ve achieved so far. We serve more than 169 million active customers through our open digital payments platform. Last year we processed 4 billion payments for people living in places as big as China and as small as Vatican City, connecting them to the world and to each other to send nearly $235 billion through our secure payments network. Sometimes this means doing the everyday things in simpler, safer ways like buying new shoes, paying for a ride or selling something on eBay. People also trust PayPal to make more meaningful connections, and donate hundreds of millions of dollars to causes they care about and send money to friends and family, no matter if they live in Atlanta or Antarctica.
We create opportunities for entrepreneurs. On a typical day PayPal customers help to crowd fund almost $1 million to support new ideas. More than 12,500 businesses sign up to use PayPal every day and through our PayPal Working Capital Program we provide capital to small business owners at a $3 million daily run rate, to help them grow and build their business.
While these numbers reflect a scale few can match, this is just the start.
Force for Good
The potential for mobile technology to transform money extends beyond commerce. The vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people lack access to even basic financial services. This makes the simplest transaction – receiving a paycheck, paying bills, sending money to a loved one – inconvenient and expensive. But in a world where 5 billion people have mobile phones, we also see an incredible opportunity to make a significant difference in people’s lives by putting the full range of financial services directly in their hands through their mobile devices.
As we move forward, we’ll work with people around the world to make financial services accessible and affordable to everyone, anywhere in the world, so that it is simpler, safer and cheaper to spend, save, manage and move money than it has ever been before.
We’ll work with merchants in markets across the globe so that in a world where all commerce is digital commerce, they can provide seamless, personalized experiences that deepen their engagement with customers while always preserving privacy and protecting security.
There are things that only a company with the global scale and capabilities of PayPal can aspire to.
But just as important as what we do is how we do it. We believe in putting people at the center of everything we do. We’re focused on understanding our customers’ relationship to money and technology, and delivering products that offer the highest levels of excellence and craftsmanship.
Customer Champion
At the heart of our vision is a deep and abiding belief that we can only achieve our dreams when we enable our customers to achieve theirs. We grow when more and more people use our services every day because they experience how much easier we make it for them to move and manage their money. We thrive when we help merchants reach more customers more effectively. We succeed – and our shareholders do as well – when we help our customers achieve their potential.
This is a memorable and exciting day for PayPal and our investors. Many people have worked hard to see PayPal become an independent company once again, and we are inspired by their support for our vision and belief in our future.
At this unprecedented moment of technology transformation – and in this exciting moment in PayPal’s history – we look forward to the limitless opportunities that lie ahead to create a world of money and financial services that are simple, safe, transparent, affordable and accessible for everyone.
* 2015 market size by E-marketer & Morgan Stanley