PayPal will not buy another bank, and specifically not one in the United States.
So declared Dan Schulman, CEO of the payments company, this week. This despite the fact that PayPal Inc. has about $6 billion of cash on its balance sheet.
“We are a bank in Europe; we are large bank over there,” Schulman said at WSJ D conference. “We hold $13, $14 billion of customer balances on our balance sheet over there. But we don’t really aspire to be a bank. We think of a world of mobile and software and thinking, if you were designing a financial system in that world, what would it look like, not sort of extrapolating what was and extending it into digital — really re-imagining the management and movement of money in a world of mobile.”
This is a bold roadmap for strategic planning at PayPal, which has been aggressively hooking into more traditional payments through partnerships with the payment networks, seemingly at odds with a “re-imagined” payments business model. Still, Schulman said PayPal reviews “100+” potential acquisitions per quarter, so perhaps that cash won’t remain idle for long.
PayPal [ticker: PYPL] has a market capitalization of nearly $50 billion.