PayPal has big plans for its latest acquisition, small business lender Swift Financial.
PayPal today announced its first acquisition since picking up TIO Networks in a $233 million deal back in February.
Terms of the transaction with Swift were not disclosed. But Palo Alto, Calif-based, PayPal has high hopes for Swift, a leading provider of working capital solutions to small businesses in the U.S.
In an email to Bank Innovation, Darrell Esch, VP, General Manager, SMB Lending at PayPal, said:
The acquisition of Swift Financial will enable us to better serve small businesses by enhancing our underwriting capabilities to provide access to affordable business financing solutions to more businesses to help them grow and thrive.
In short, the Wilmington, Delaware– based Swift will give PayPal access to additional financial data that will enable PayPal’s small business lending service provider, PayPal Working Capital, to provide small and mid-sized businesses additional loans and other supplementary financial services.
Currently, PayPal Working Capital customers can access up to 25% of their annual PayPal sales with a maximum loan size of $125,000. Swift will increase this amount by providing assess supplemental financial documentation as part of the loan underwriting process to offer access to “more meaningful” loan amounts to merchants, according to Esch.
Furthermore, Swift also introduces it to other markets, according to Esch, who said:
In addition to serving our PayPal small and mid-sized merchants, the acquisition of Swift Financial allows us to better serve marketplace partners and acquire omni-channel prospects, and ultimately helps us fuel our core payments business.
Regarding whether PayPal will fold Swift completely into the PayPal Working Capital Business or maintain Swift as a standalone, here’s what Esch said:
We are already working with Swift Financial on a white-label basis to offer our PayPal Business Loan to certain merchants. We will work quickly to integrate Swift Financial’s platform and underwriting into our business for all merchants to benefit. No decision has been finalized with regards to the Swift brand.
The acquisition, which is subject to certain to certain conditions, is expected to close later in the year.
Although the purchase of Swift marks PayPal’s second acquisition this year, the payment services company has been conservative in its acquisition strategy. It will continue on this path.
The same cannot be said for its partnerships.
In PayPal’s earnings call in July, CEO Dan Schulman pointed out the company made 24 major partnerships (Google, Samsung, Baidu to name a few) in past 18 months alone, and will continue to do so aggressively. Schulman said in the earnings call on July 27:
There’re a number of other partnerships that are on the horizon and I think the more we partner the more people see that the benefit of doing that could be quite substantial.
And while PayPal has a strong balance sheet; $6.4 billion of cash equivalents to be specific, PayPal will be not be using the bulk of this cash to pursue M&A.
In the earnings call, Schulman said:
Our guidance is over $2.9 billion of free cash flow for the year. So that’s the competitive advantage for us. There is no question about it and we are very active and looking at range of opportunities around the world, both big and small. But look those opportunities needs the time to our vision in our mission. They got to accelerate our progress either against the key vertical or geographic expansion.
Paypal, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol PYPL, has a market capitalization of $70.77 Billion.