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• Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2020

  PayPal: The Next Chapter

  Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb

  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

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

  The New LAX: Ready for Takeoff? Video Supplement

  Boris Groysberg, Annelena Lobb and Michael Norris

  Citation:

  Groysberg, Boris, Annelena Lobb, and Michael Norris. "The New LAX: Ready for Takeoff? Video Supplement." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Supplement 420-719, July 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020 (Revised July 2020)

  Unrest in Chile

  Vincent Pons, William Mullins, John Masko, Annelena Lobb and Rafael Di Tella

  In 2020, Chileans would head to the ballot box to decide their country’s future. Many international observers credited Chile’s decades of neoliberal governance with turning the country into Latin America’s “Tiger,” a prosperous, diversified economy on its way to becoming the continent’s first developed country. But in October of 2019, a mass protest movement ground the country to a halt and shocked its political class, showing the world a different Chile—one defined by inequality, social distrust, and a young generation of political activists. As Chile prepared to vote in the fall of 2020 on whether to adopt a new constitution, could it sculpt a more equitable society while remaining “the exception” on a continent known for its political instability? Or would Chile’s prosperity go the same way as its neoliberal experiment?

  Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Macroeconomics; Economy; Political Elections; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Equality and Inequality; System Shocks; Chile; Latin America;

  Citation:

  Pons, Vincent, William Mullins, John Masko, Annelena Lobb, and Rafael Di Tella. "Unrest in Chile." Harvard Business School Case 720-033, April 2020. (Revised July 2020.)  View Details

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