Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, PayPal says it is seeing unprecedented demand over the past one month, with significant increase in the number of transactions. May 1 was the highest transaction day ever in the history of PayPal.
PayPal currently has an active customer base of 300 million. It anticipates 15-20 million active customers in Q2.
The shift in digital payments in India is now accelerating in the wake of COVID-19. PayPal says the transition to digital transactions is happening not due to disruptions like demonetisation but more from a safety aspect. "The tendency of Indian customers to use cash has gone down, and they now want to use digital money as it is a safer option. Even older people are getting onto digital payment platforms," the company says.
As per a study, there has been a 32% increase in customers using digital payments while 47% have concerns over fraud amid the pandemic.
The company has taken measures to enhance security by setting up cyber defence centers where people are looking for attack vectors 24/7. Customers are protected by depth and layered security which implies protections that apply within the app, network applications, right kind of infrastructure etc. PayPal is collaborating with a lot of developers across the world to identify bugs.
Talking about the scale of its business, PayPal says Rs 16 lakh worth transactions are being processed per second, Rs 15,000 crore a day, and Rs 50 lakh crore a year.
PayPal employs the power of ML algorithms to process transactions.
PayPal says sustainable growth will depend on how the company can manage frauds in the system. A huge area of focus is to give its 300 million+ customers a seamless experience through the use of augmented intelligence.
A lot of cutting-edge work is being done at their data centers in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad, PayPal adds.