PayPal Canada chief sees bigger things for Canada
TORONTO — Canada is already PayPal Holdings Inc.’s fifth-largest market, but new general manager Paul Parisi sees growth opportunity.
Parisi wants to make Canadian entrepreneurs into PayPal customers by helping them start selling products and services online. With just one in five Canadian businesses currently involved in e-commerce, Parisi said he thinks he can turn the country into PayPal’s No. 2 region.
“The opportunity is ripe to help that Canadian business sell online, both domestically and internationally,” Parisi said. “The market has huge potential for us.”
Parisi joins PayPal after 17 years at American Express Co., where he was vice-president and general manager of global commercial payments in Canada. He shares a former employer with Dan Schulman, who has been PayPal’s chief executive for two years and also worked at American Express prior to joining the company.
PayPal has undergone a lot of changes under Schulman’s leadership. The digital payments company went public for the second time in July 2015 after spinning off from former parent company eBay Inc. and has since grown 15 per cent to a market capitalization of $47.39 billion US, making the Fortune 500 for the first time in 2016.
PayPal’s first initial public offering was in 2002, making it an early adopter in a fast-growing industry that pulled in $1.7 trillion US in 2014, according to a report by McKinsey & Company, Inc. The company is best known as a payment option for online shopping, with Canadian customers including Roots Canada Ltd., Indigo Books & Music Inc. and Cineplex Inc.
PayPal now faces stiff competition from companies like Square Inc., which facilitates in-store payments for small businesses, and Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, which allows customers to tap their smartphones to pay for purchases. But PayPal has the advantage of 188 million active customer accounts, including 6.4 million Canadians.
The company recently announced partnerships with MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. to make PayPal an option for more in-store purchases. It also acquired Xoom, which helps people send money across borders, and Venmo, a service that’s popular with American millennials that allows people to send money to each other via text message.
Xoom and Venmo aren’t available in Canada, but Parisi said PayPal is focused on maintaining its lead in mobile payments in the country. The company has doubled its Canadian mobile users year over year and sees opportunity in food ordering and transportation.
“Our vision is to continue growing the mobile user space,” Parisi said. “We’re already a big player in it, but getting more and more businesses that are in that space to become partners ... Would be where we’re trying to go.”
Parisi said the key to keeping PayPal innovative and relevant is nurturing relationships with other cutting-edge technology firms. To that end, the company is moving about 30 employees who currently work at PayPal Canada’s Toronto office at King Street West and York Street to the MaRS Discovery District, where they’ll share a building with clients including AirBnb Inc., Etsy Inc. and Facebook Inc.
Parisi said he expects to complete the move some time in October or early November.