PayPal's CEO on Creating Products for Underserved Markets

Back when the author was the CEO of Virgin Mobile, he accepted a challenge to live like a homeless person for 24 hours in New York City--with no money or credit card, no cell phone, just the clothes on his back. A few years later, when he was head of a division at American Express, he joined his leadership team in a variation on that experiment: They would spend an entire day trying to pay bills and transfer money the way people without bank accounts or credit cards have to. Those experiences increased his empathy for less-affluent people and his awareness of how difficult it is for them to manage and move money--and energized PayPal's new strategy after Schulman joined the company as CEO, in 2014. That strategy was to be a "customer champion" company and reorganize into just two groups: merchants and consumers. For merchants, PayPal would evolve its technology platform to enable more-intimate relationships with customers using mobile and software. For consumers, it would empower underserved citizens throughout the world to make more-secure, faster, easier, and less-expensive financial transactions. Within those two segments, the company has created or acquired a suite of products that target different markets, including Venmo for Millennials, Xoom for international digital payments, and PayPal Working Capital, which lends money to small businesses.

• Organizational restructuring
• Executives
• Customer-centricity
• Strategic alliances
• Personal finance