PayPal
|
PayPal Inc. is an American e-commerce service which enables users around the world to send and receive payments and money transfers over the internet. Initially founded in 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, the company was then taken public in 2002 and has since grown to become the world's most widely used online payment service, processing nearly 8 million transactions daily. In addition to servicing online financial transactions between individuals, PayPal also operates as an intermediary between online businesses and customers. As of 2017, PayPal has nearly 200 million registered users and allows transactions in 25 different currencies. The company is currently headquartered in San Jose, California and has 18,000 employees. PayPal Inc. has undergone numerous transformations since its founding through its expansion of services and product offerings which have had an influential impact on the advancement and overall landscape of the entire online payment industry. The procedures and usage of PayPal have been met with substantial ethical criticism, consumer complaints, as well as involvement in several class-action lawsuits.
History
PayPal initially was founded under the name Confinity in 1998 as a company which developed cryptography services used for making Palm Pilot payments. It was not until 1999 when the company officially launched and adopted the name PayPal as a money transfer service. The following year, Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s company X.com, adopted its name and began solely focusing on further research and development into the PayPal product. After a corporate restructuring in 2001, the company decided to change its name one last time to PayPal Inc. since many of its surveyed consumers found the name X.com to be vague.
With only 600 employees and $50 million in revenues during the final quarter of 2001, PayPal Inc. decided to file for an IPO and was taken public in 2002 with share prices of $13. Upon becoming a public company, PayPal Inc. was soon acquired by the online auction and shopping website eBay and quickly grew to become the primary method of payment used on the site as eBay gradually phased out its own competing payment service Billpoint Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
