Is PayPal Everywhere an existential threat to banks and traditional debit?
Long a major player in ecommerce, PayPal is now pouring effort and promotion into a second retail front: the in-store experience. New CEO Alex Chriss says PayPal will serve consumers' desire for omnichannel payments and plans to entice them with cashback as high as 15% on select categories. Can banks compete?
A little more than a year after Alex Chriss became PayPal’s president and CEO, the ecommerce payments giant has launched a major assault on in-store spending that includes major consumer incentives, plans to hook into Apple’s iPhone NFC chip, and a big-budget advertising campaign featuring comedian Will Ferrell. It all comes under the banner, “PayPal Everywhere.”
A few days after the company announced the PayPal Everywhere concept, Chriss characterized it as a strategy to dramatically expand the total addressable market that PayPal can process.
“If you think about PayPal, it is a business that 80% of Americans have used over the last few years. But it’s almost all online, all through ecommerce,” said Chriss in a Goldman Sachs’ fireside chat. We wanted to take the brand that people love — the product that people love and know for security and safety — and add value proposition and rewards.”
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