Jeff Jordan spent five years running Web marketplace eBay North America, where he was considered a possible heir apparent to Chief Executive Margaret C. “Meg” Whitman. His appointment last January as president of PayPal, eBay’s Web payment system, indicates how strongly eBay wants PayPal to turn into the premier method for online payments, on or off eBay.
BusinessWeek also reports :
Q: What merchants are you going after, and what can you offer them?
A: The bulk of it is large merchants. We’re in conversations with a lot of these guys. The merchants right now, from the largest to the smallest, are very concerned about the cost of payments. The cost of their credit-card accounts keeps going up, and the merchants aren’t happy about this.
Half of our mix [of buyer payment sources] is noncredit-card sources such as checking accounts [which don't charge transfer fees]. That has created an interest in PayPal as a potential way to help [merchants] manage their costs. It’s still an aspiration for us, frankly. We’re not bulletproof in terms of the services large merchants need.
[...]
Q: Some analysts suggest that PayPal could become a true competitor to credit cards, even off the Web, especially with the deal PayPal has with GE Consumer Finance to provide a buyer line of credit. Is that possible?
A: Our horizon right now is that we want to be the standard for online payments. For a five-year-old company with a 9% share of the U.S. consumer e-commerce payments and a 5% share of global consumer e-commerce payments, we’re flattered to be considered in the same breath with credit card companies. There’s no Trojan horse in our plans.
Q: How are you fighting increasingly sophisticated criminals?
A: There is a huge educational challenge. It’s a bit of an arms race. As we get better and better, giving our users tools to avoid fraud, these people trying to take over members’ accounts have to send out 10 times, 20 times, 50 times as many e-mails to get that same number of accounts, because their yields are going down so dramatically.
Q: Last year, PayPal’s site went down for several days. What are you doing to make sure it’s bulletproof?
A: It was a bit of a wake-up call last year. If we are servicing iTunes Music Store as a payment mark, they expect 100% uptime. We’re working toward our next-generation system to get there. There’s a ton of work to get where we want to go.
Click here to read the entire article on BusinessWeek.