PayPal CEO commits to $3bn a year in M&A spending
PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman told a German business daily, Handelsblatt, that the spending spree the company has been on in over the past few years (five acquisitions in the past 24 months) is not slowing down yet, reports David Penn at Finovate.
“We have a healthy balance sheet and we are ready to put it to work to buy more companies,” Schulman told Handlesblatt this week, adding that the company was prepared to invest up to $3 billion a year on acquisitions geared toward “specific capabilities”.
Some of these specific capabilities include fraud prevention, courtesy of PayPal’s acquisition of Simility for $120 million; merchant payouts thanks to its purchase of Hyperwallet for $400 million; and even artificial intelligence (AI) powered marketing technology with its pick up of Jetlore this spring for an undisclosed sum.
But PayPal’s biggest buy of 2018 so far is clearly the $2.2 billion in cash spent on Swedish payments start-up iZettle, which the company acquired in May. Referred to as the “Square of Europe,” iZettle is the largest acquisition in PayPal’s history and will help put the company’s service in hundreds of thousands of brick and mortar stores, and help PayPal compete with rivals – like Square.
In addition to a busy acquisition pace, PayPal has been making friends and influencing people, as well, of late. The company sold its consumer credit receivables business to Synchrony for $6.9 billion earlier this month.
Schulman noted at the time that the move would help the company invest in other areas of the business or fund future acquisitions.
PayPal expanded its partnership with Google Pay in May, making PayPal as a payment option throughout the Google ecosystem.
Also that month, the company extended its agreement with Visa to speed the adoption of digital and mobile payments in Canada.
In April, PayPal teamed up with Yahoo to make PayPal subsidiary Braintree available to online merchants using Yahoo Merchant Solutions and Yahoo Stores platforms.
