The one area that we got a little bit away from was the merchant side. We became part of the PayPal family in late 2008, and at that time the strategy was largely around taking this high-growth company and helping it continue to build out the consumer value proposition. How does "buy now, pay later" fit into PayPal's overall strategy? This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. We caught up with him to talk about PayPal's strategy to counter the upstarts. Pay later," Internet Archive captures show.) Now he's working to help PayPal reclaim its pioneering position. He points out that Bill Me Later had a "pay later" tagline long before the term was trendy. Lisiewski is well versed in consumer credit. A key aspect of its new super app, which combines sending money, paying and shopping, is its $4 billion purchase of Honey, a coupon-code tool, which now provides offers for the PayPal app's shopping hub. Its app remains far more popular than those from Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay, though PayPal's rivals are pushing them hard, and Afterpay is set to combine with Cash App after Square's $29 billion purchase of Afterpay goes through. About 40,000 merchants have put PayPal's pay-later messaging on product or other pages, and far more - 650,000 merchants - have made sales on PayPal's pay-later terms.Īt the same time, PayPal is developing its consumer side. Merchants that are already integrated with PayPal can flip on Pay Later without having to install new code or pay extra. PayPal is now responding, leveraging its existing network of 32 million merchants and 403 million active accounts. It largely succeeded at that while building a massive merchant network.īut "buy now, pay later" providers offered something new to merchants: higher order values and increased conversions, often in exchange for a higher cut of the resulting purchase. The company focused on the consumer experience: on the theory that easing checkout was the most important way to boost conversions for retailers. There's a simple reason PayPal is playing catchup in this fast-growing niche, according to Greg Lisiewski, a veteran executive who joined PayPal through the Bill Me Later deal and is now vice president and general manager of its global pay-later business. But only $1.5 billion of that was in "buy now, pay later." Affirm did $2.5 billion in gross merchandise value in the same period, and Klarna handled $20 billion. In the second quarter, PayPal processed $311 billion in total payment volume. By cutting out the traditional payment rails, they're a threat not just to credit card companies but to PayPal as well - a menace that's only going to grow as they copy features PayPal has long had, like accounts that can hold cash balances for spending. But even though it bought BillMeLater, a company devoted to pay-later purchases, in 2008 when the market was still nascent, and turned it into its PayPal Credit division, "buy now, pay later" is a tiny part of the stream of commerce PayPal facilitates.Ĭompanies like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna have cozied up to merchants so they can capture the attention of consumers both as they shop and as they're about to pay. PayPal was an early leader in online payments and still dominates that market. A veteran of PayPal's "buy now, pay later" efforts says there's a simple reason it gave up its early lead as a pioneer of fast online credit: It wasn't focusing on merchants.
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