PayPal appoints Vikram Narayan as country manager for India

Online payments major PayPal has appointed Vikram Narayan as its country manager and managing director for India. According to his LinkedIn profile, the appointment happened in April this year. In his new role, Narayan will focus on educating Indian merchants, developing partnerships, and working with the global and regional teams to deliver localised product experiences for customers.

With over two decades of work experience, Narayan's key focus areas include strategy, business development, and regulatory & public affairs for companies. Prior to PayPal, he was the CEO and country manager at Experian Services India Pvt Ltd. Before that, he was senior VP and business head– commercial vehicles & construction equipment finance at GE Commercial Finance, India.

He had also earlier worked at companies like Transamerica Commercial Finance Corporation and Apple Finance Limited (AFL). Narayan holds a MBA degree from Drake University (USA), as well as BCom and MCom degrees from University of Delhi.

"Appointed three months ago, Narayan's focus will be on educating Indian merchants on growth opportunities in the global e-commerce marketplace, developing partnerships to bring the right portfolio of customers to the network, and working with the global and regional teams to deliver great localised product experiences for customers," PayPal told The Hindu.

In related news, online marketplace eBay announced that it has hired around 100 graduates. A large chunk of them will work at the PayPal India development centres.

A subsidiary of eBay Inc., PayPal processes more than nine million payments every day. PayPal claims that it has 143 million active accounts in 193 markets and 26 currencies around the world. Headquartered in San Jose in California with its international headquarters in Singapore, the company has a development centre in Chennai in India.

In March this year, PayPal had roped in Rakesh 'Rocky' Agrawal as director of strategy. Within a month, he was asked to leave the company after he published a series of tweets against a few of its senior executives. Some of Agrawal's Twitter 'victims' at PayPal included the company's global head of communications Christina Smedley and retail chief Don Kingsborough.

Around the same time, activist investor Carl Icahn, who holds 2.15 per cent stake in eBay, had called for spinning off PayPal payments unit. However, Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and its largest shareholder with a stake of 8.37 per cent rejected the demand, saying he has the support of some of the most active shareholders.