Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring that low-income consumers and small businesses can efficiently and inexpensively manage their money. The company fully lives into this purpose, sending employees out into communities to experience firsthand the indignities and high fees imposed on the unbanked, dramatically lowering the cost of international remittances, enabling small businesses to access working capital without credit checks, and facilitating cross-border purchases for small merchants. The company takes the welfare of each stakeholder group seriously: achieving racial and gender pay equity, raising hourly worker pay and benefits to ensure a living wage, and building a diverse and inclusive culture; working closely with regulators and law enforcement to unearth signs of sex trafficking and terrorism; aggressively removing hate-group transactions; providing $4 billion in credit to hundreds of thousands of small businesses that would never have qualified for bank loans, especially those owned by women and people of color. Together these actions have built a high degree of trust that creates a competitive moat in the otherwise commodity business of online payments. During the pandemic, the company was able to get stimulus funds to individuals and small businesses far faster and less expensively than banks or the SBA, and committed $500 million to investments in black-owned businesses. In the 5 years since its IPO, despite intense competition from major banks and credit card companies, Google, Apple, and countless VC-backed fintech players, the company has more than doubled its users, increased profits and boosted the stock price 500%.
Citation:
Porter, Michael, Mark Kramer, and Annelena Lobb. "PayPal: The Next Chapter." Harvard Business School Case 721-378, August 2020. View Details