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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%.

  Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Finance; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Social Entrepreneurship; Competitive Advantage; Financial Services Industry;

  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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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Updating the Balanced Scorecard for Triple Bottom Line Strategies

  Robert S. Kaplan and David McMillan

  Many companies are now attempting to achieve triple bottom line performance on financial, environmental, and societal metrics. Successful strategies for such performance, however, generally require new relationships among multiple players in multiple sectors across a company’s supply chain for products and talent. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), originally developed to describe and implement a single organization’s strategy, needs to be adapted to reflect such multi-stakeholder strategies for triple bottom line performance. The Financial perspective is replaced by “Outcomes” to encompass financial, environmental, and societal metrics; Customer becomes “Stakeholders” to reflect the interests of the multiple participants in the ecosystem; and Learning & Growth becomes “Enablers” to include the new capabilities for collaboration and alignment. The paper motivates and illustrates the new framework with examples from innovative agribusiness ecosystems.

  Keywords: Balanced Scorecard; Adaptation; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Performance; Strategy;

  Citation:

  Kaplan, Robert S., and David McMillan. "Updating the Balanced Scorecard for Triple Bottom Line Strategies." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-028, August 2020.  View Details

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

  Performance Management at Afreximbank

  Robert S. Kaplan, Siko Sikochi and Josh Steimle

  Based in Cairo, Afreximbank was founded in October 1993 as a specialized continental financial institution designed to address the low level of intra-African trade, the decline in financial flows to Africa, the worsening external debt situation of many African countries, and the sharp reduction in lending to Africa by international commercial banks. This case study explores how the Bank introduced the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to improve the Bank’s performance management system. The goal was to transform the Bank’s bureaucratic culture and processes into one more attuned to the fast-paced and dramatic changes happening in Africa. The case examines how the BSC is being used to implement the Bank’s strategy and the issues arising from its implementation. The case facilitates a discussion on whether the Bank had become entrepreneurial enough to keep pace with the continent’s thriving, emerging markets.

  Keywords: performance management; Balanced Scorecard; Performance Expectations; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; Organizational Culture; Strategy; Banking Industry; Africa; Egypt;

  Citation:

  Kaplan, Robert S., Siko Sikochi, and Josh Steimle. "Performance Management at Afreximbank." Harvard Business School Case 120-029, March 2020. (Revised July 2020.)  View Details

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