- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
DIGITAL payment solutions provider PayPal on Wednesday (1) said India is the “bedrock” of its development capabilities and it continues to hire people aggressively in the country to further build and drive the teams.
The US-based firm, which had announced its exit from the domestic payment services in India five months ago, said it is focused on enabling small businesses in the country to leverage digital platforms and expand their cross-border sales.
“We have a significant presence in Chennai and Bengaluru, we have a sales and marketing office within Mumbai and between our payments teams, our merchant teams, a lot of the infrastructure teams are out of India. India is literally the bedrock of our development capabilities that we have,” PayPal senior vice president (Omni Payments) Jim Magats told the media in a virtual briefing.
PayPal has more than 5,500 employees across its tech centers in Indian cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.
Stressing on PayPal’s aggressive hiring in India, Wes Hummel, its vice president of Site Reliability and Cloud Engineering, said, “I have my infrastructure team, I have a significant contingent out there…we’ll continue to build out there, it’s a key part of our go-forward strategy and a key part of our hiring strategy. We found an incredible mix of operations, engineering folks, folks that actually will help us continue to build and drive that engine in PayPal.”
In February, PayPal said that it had processed $1.4 billion worth of international sales for more than 3.6 lakh (0.36 million) merchants in India in 2020. When asked about the financial technology firm’s exit from the domestic payments segment in India. Magats said the company took the decision to focus on cross-border payments.
“There are lots of providers that are in the market around digital payments within India for domestic payments, I think there are very few that have the strength and capabilities and can bring cross-border (payments), and we decided to focus our efforts on where we felt we could add the most value,” he said.
Magats said the number of businesses coming online has grown significantly amid the pandemic, and PayPal is looking at evolving to a commerce company.
“We’re evolving ourselves to be really a commerce organisation and what that really means for us is enabling tools that help these small businesses in particular, to sell on different channels as well as to be able to get access to their customers, much more easily,” he said, adding that one of the biggest problems that the small businesses face is getting access to customers.
Magats said PayPal is looking at becoming a ‘super app’ for consumers for financial services, bill payments, and others.
