PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told CNBC that the digital payments industry may become a $100 trillion market as the financial technology sector continues to grow rapidly.
“It could be, you know, a $100 trillion market,” he said in an interview with Wilfred Frost on “Closing Bell” Tuesday. “That’s sort of the market — total addressable market — we’re playing into. We may have, like, 1-2 percent share of that market today.”
“PayPal’s popular mobile payments service continues to partner with more merchants,” he said. He added that no signs of disappointing holiday sales or a potential global slowdown had been detected. The number of payments processed on the platform increased by 80% year-over-year in the last quarter, and Schulman is optimistic that the company could process more than $100 billion worth of transactions in 2019.
“We live in the space of digital commerce and digital commerce is exploding still around the world,” he said. “There’s an explosion in digital commerce and we’re riding that wave. What we see is pretty positive.”
He also touched upon the competition brewing with developing fintech services like Zelle, the digital payments network owned by seven banks including JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America.
“People are thinking about how can they use technology to better serve customers,” he added. “I think it’s going to be less and less about how does one company hyper-serve customers. I think the new way of the world going forward is how do companies take the best of their platforms put them together to better serve companies.”
PayPal’s market cap as of Tuesday was roughly $111 Billion.
“P2P, or peer-to-peer payments, is exploding in the market. It’s a multi-hundred-billion-dollar marketplace. This will definitely not be a winner take all,” Schulman said.
“Additionally, PayPal is tapping into marketplaces around the globe and Asia is one of its fastest-growing regions,” Schulman said. “Those countries include India, China and Japan. Building relationships with online markets like Amazon and Alibaba, where they are seeing 40 percent year-over-year growth, has been a key strategy for the digital commerce company to offset slowing growth that has affected eBay, PayPal’s former parent company that it continues to partner with,” he said.
