PayPal is a financial service that allows individuals and businesses to easily make payments online. It was founded back in 1998 by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and eventually merged with former rival company X.com founded by business magnate Elon Musk.
The company started acquiring users at an incredible pace, particularly due to its heavy incentivized referral program that was giving $10 back for each friend referred.
PayPal became vital in the architecture of the web, guaranteeing secure transactions when there was little trust in eCommerce transactions. That’s why eBay proposed its offer to acquire PayPal in 2002 for the record amount of 1.4 billion dollars. In September 2014, eBay's spin-off phase began with PayPal, which gave it to a company of its own – PayPal Holdings Inc., which made its stock exchange debut in the summer of 2015.
Over the last decade, PayPal continued to evolve, becoming always more prominent with strategic acquisitions like the one of Honey, Braintree, and Venmo just to name a few. This furtherly exemplifies the realization of its mission, vision, and core values which we’re going to analyze in this article.
PayPal’s Mission Statement
PayPal’s mission statement is: “we believe that now is the time to reimagine money, to democratize financial services so that managing and moving money is a right for all citizens, not just the affluent.”
This mission statement appears highly aspirational, but despite the hard mission that people at PayPal decided to endure, it seems that California-based company has realized lots of advancement in the democratization of currency.
Most notably, PayPal was initially part (and subsequently withdrew) of Facebook Libra’s cryptocurrency, which is just one of the practical examples of how PayPal tries to keep innovating and makes its vision reality. Another emblematic case is the acquisition of Venmo, a fintech company particularly loved by millennials.
PayPal’s Vision Statement
PayPal’s vision statement is: “we believe every person has the right to participate fully in the global economy. We have an obligation to empower people to exercise this right and improve financial health.”
Despite being of colossal sizes now and it can easily compete with other historical financial institutions, PayPal remains a tech-company at heart, and with this vision statement, it re-instances the reasons why it was created by its founders in the first place: to make financial transactions more efficient and accessible.
The realization of this vision means a better future and empowerment for all people in the world.
PayPal’s Core Values
PayPal’s core values include “collaboration, demonstrating integrity, trust, respect, empathy, innovation, wellness, and inclusion.”
These principles are the compass at PayPal for setting priorities and making decisions. They’re all elements of which we’re all in control, and the fintech company re-marked its strive to realize them.
