Payments giant PayPal will “probably” not be following Tesla’s lead in bitcoin (BTC) buying just yet – but it will spare no effort in allowing its customers to fill their boots with crypto-related offerings.
In presentations to investors, PayPal Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dan Schulman spoke, along with Chief Financial Officer (CFO) John Rainey, expanded on the company’s grand plans as it aims to become a “super-app” – something akin to China’s AliPay, offering interoperability with a range of payment instruments. PayPal aims to almost double its customer base to 750 million users by 2025.
And crypto appears to be playing an important role in these plans: The firm said it will roll out the same crypto buy, sell and hold services that it currently operates in the USA in the UK at an unspecified date in the near future.
But speaking to CNBC, Rainey said,
PayPal has been widely credited for sparking the latest bull run in BTC and altcoins when it announced the start of its American crypto services. And the firm claimed that the uptake had been extremely promising so far.
Schulman said,
“This is precisely the type of engagement that we want to see as we add these additional financial services.”
But the company does not seem keen on adding BTC or any other token to its own reserves, despite bullish statements about what it plans to do with its newfound wealth after raking in a cool USD 21.5 billion in 2020.
Schulman indicated that the firm wanted to prioritize rewarding its shareholders and M&A deals.
He said,
“Digital currencies and the underlying technology have the potential to drive the next wave in financial services and I think those technologies can help solve some of the fundamental problems of the system the fact that there is a huge prevalence and cost of cash that there is a lack of access for so many parts of the population into the system that there is limited liquidity there is high friction in commerce and payments.”
However, the CEO added that all progress would be made in step with regulatory guidelines, concluding,
“Distributed ledgers can form the new foundation of a new way to manage and move money to really create new rails a new way of thinking about how we manage how we move money in the digital era and I think our platform is uniquely situated to help enable this vision to provide both broad access increasing utility and, very importantly, to work hand-in-hand with governments regulators and central banks.”