Bill Ready: PayPal ‘miles ahead’, welcomes rivals to the ecosystem

PayPal says it is just scratching the surface of its potential as it enters the Fortune 500 for the first time.

PayPal head of product Bill Ready says ‘our conversion rate on mobile is more than double that of our closest competitor’. Picture: David Swan.

PayPal’s global head of product, Bill Ready, is confident his company’s dominance in digital payments is set to continue, declaring PayPal is just scratching the surface of its potential as it enters the Fortune 500 for the first time.

Mr Ready, who remains responsible for PayPal’s Braintree unit after it was acquired in 2013 and runs PayPal’s engineering operations, said the company was miles ahead of the competition.

“This is something we can solve better than anyone else in the world,” he said.

“We can control the process end to end, in a way that consumers don’t have to do any extra work and the merchants don’t ­either.”

According to Mr Ready, the proof is in the numbers, given that the e-commerce industry is growing at a clip of about 10 per cent annually but PayPal’s volumes are growing at 30 per cent.

“We’re taking tremendous market share, and we’ll continue to do so,” he said.

“Our conversion rate on mobile is more than double that of our closest competitor.”

Mr Ready isn’t just unfazed by young upstarts such as Stripe and threats from the likes of Google and Amazon, but said that given digital wallet transactions — including Apple Pay and Android Pay — account for just 1 per cent of the world’s commerce, PayPal still had plenty of room to grow.

“We did $US280 billion of volume last year, but if you think about that in the total amount of commerce in the world, there are $20 trillion or so of transactions,” Mr Ready said.

“We want to see digital become 10, 20, 30 per cent of the world’s transactions.

“That’ll take a while but having other people enter the ecosystem only helps us.”

PayPal may have come a long way from its humble roots as a handheld security software firm called Confinity to a multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 behemoth, but it’s not afraid of controversy.

Earlier this year, PayPal cancelled plans to build a $US3.6 million ($4.7m) global operations centre in North Carolina, after the state passed a law targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens.

According to Mr Ready, the decision was completely justified.

“We believe strongly as a workforce in inclusion and diversity. It’s a big part of how we drive innovation and a core part of our ethos, and there are times when you have the opportunity not just to talk the talk but walk the walk,” he said. “It’s not about engaging in politics, it’s just the right thing to do.”

As for the company’s founders — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman — often referred to as the PayPal Mafia, Mr Ready said their vision of PayPal as a global force was alive and well.

“It’s pretty amazing to be the size we are now with all the potential we have left and all of the stuff Elon Musk was talking about in the early 2000s, about the promise of PayPal,” he said. “It’s another example of why he may be the Thomas Edison of our times.

“Here we sit 15-plus years since it all started and we’re actually doing what the founders wanted to achieve.”