Incoming PayPal CEO: 'Data Gives Us A Tremendous Advantage Over Any Startup'

As eBay Inc EBAY prepares itself to spin-off its subsidiary PayPal into another publicly traded entity, Incoming CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman, was on CNBC recently to discuss the business strategy of PayPal going forward and the competition PayPal faces from Apple Pay and other startups.

World’s Largest Open Digital Payments Platform

“I think there are number of different players in the ecosystem,” Schulman said. “There are obviously financial institutions, tech companies, there are OEMs, there are carriers, there are merchants themselves and we will be open to partnering with them in any one of a number of ways.”

He continued, “In fact one of the things we are going to be talking about today is how we are moving from being more than just a button on a website and really trying to aspire to becoming the world’s largest open digital payments platform.”

Explosion In Digital Payments

Schulman didn’t seem much worried about the competition from Apple Pay. He said, “We did $4 billion transactions last year. Mobile grew last year tremendously in the first quarter. Thirty percent of our overall billion transactions we did were on mobile, that grew 40 percent year-over-year and so you're seeing an explosion in digital payments going forward.”

Data Gives Us Advantage

On the competition that he faces form startups like Stripe, Schulman said, “That data gives us a tremendous advantage over any startup, that scale because we can use that data to sort through risk, analytics, how can we prevent bad guys from coming in, allow good transactions to happen.”