Everyone hates Mondays. But the folks at PayPal probably had a rougher Monday than you.
First, it was reported that Amazon was taking on the eBay subsidiary with a new subscription and recurring payments billing service. Amazon users can now use their accounts and instantly bill the credit card (or account) on file to make payments for cell phone bills and subscription services like Spotify and Netflix.
The new feature seems like a another step for Amazon in the payments market and taking on PayPal. (PayPal’s own bill pay service was discontinued in August 2005.) The Amazon service seeems to be an extension of capabilities for “Login and Pay with Amazon,” introduced in the fall of 2013, so that customers can pay with their credit or debit card linked to Amazon.com with third-party websites.
Next came news that that PayPal cofounder Max Levchin made himself CEO of Affirm, a startup that was developed from Levchin’s own incubator, HVF. The Wall Street Journal reported that Affirm has raised $45 million from a number of influential venture capitalists, including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Nyca Partners. It should be noted that Affirm is not a direct competitor of PayPal’s — the company focuses on providing customers with instant lines of credit, with risk being gauged from information available in social media profiles, as opposed to the more conventional FICO scores. But still it must sting that Levchin went back into the financial technology industry and didn’t invite PayPal — which has its own credit products with small-business loans and Bill Me Later — as a partner.
Then, toward the end of the business day for the East Coast, came the biggest news: PayPal president David Marcus decided to leave the company and become the head of messaging at Facebook. The move meant that PayPal loses its leader in a critical time: while PayPal has been successful, rumors that major tech giants like Apple are gearing up towards their own payments service — most likely without PayPal’s help, no matter how much PayPal reportedly offered — and companies like Amazon were already encroaching on PayPal’s turf. (PandoDaily is reporting today that Bill Ready, the head of Braintree, a PayPal unit, is the frontrunner for Marcus’s position.)
Without Marcus, who has been a driving force in PayPal’s focus on mobile, PayPal loses a leader that provided stability throughout the company. The general consensus seems to be that Marcus wanted to pursue a new path — he wrote in a Facebook post that he was “looking forward to getting my hands dirty again attempting to build something new and meaningful at scale” — and not that there was something wrong at PayPal. In his Facebook post, Marcus had nothing but kind words for his now ex-company.
That’s three whammies on one Monday.
So, as Monday’s go, PayPal’s was pretty bad. It gained a powerful new competitor in Amazon, saw a cofounder decide to head up a buzzy startup, and watched as its president jumped ship to Facebook to lead messaging and presumably help monetize Facebook’s messaging service (which doesn’t include WhatsApp, which will continue to run independently).
The good news is that while these developments aren’t great, they’re not crippling. As I wrote before, Amazon still has a long ways to go before they have a viable payments service. PayPal, through its acquisition, has developed quite a dynamic internal team and replacing Marcus shouldn’t be difficult. Finally, Affirm isn’t an issue for PayPal — yet. So, while PayPal had quite a bad Monday, here’s hoping that the rest of the week is a little bit better for the payments industry giant.