Back when the author was the CEO of Virgin Mobile, he accepted a
challenge to live like a homeless person for 24 hours in New York
City—with no money or credit card, no cell phone, just the clothes on
his back. A few years later, when he was head of a division at American
Express, he joined his leadership team in a variation on that
experiment: They would spend an entire day trying to pay bills and
transfer money the way people without bank accounts or credit cards have
to. Those experiences increased his empathy for less-affluent people
and his awareness of how difficult it is for them to manage and move
money—and energized PayPal’s new strategy after Schulman joined the
company as CEO, in 2014. That strategy was to be a “customer champion”
company and reorganize into just two groups: merchants and consumers.
For merchants, PayPal would evolve its technology platform to enable
more-intimate relationships with customers using mobile and software.
For consumers, it would empower underserved citizens throughout the
world to make more-secure, faster, easier, and less-expensive financial
transactions. Within those two segments, the company has created or
acquired a suite of products that target different markets, including
Venmo for Millennials, Xoom for international digital payments, and
PayPal Working Capital, which lends money to small businesses. INSET:
How PayPal Serves Consumers and Merchants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]