PayPal opens technology centre in Hyderabad, third in India

San Jose, California-based digital payments company PayPal has opened a new global technology centre in Hyderabad, the third in India after Chennai and Bengaluru.

The Hyderabad centre will be headed by Swastik Bihani who has earlier worked with Zeesoft, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Juniper Networks, CipherCloud and Simility, the company said in a statement. 

The new centre will focus on controlling frauds against small and medium-sized businesses using PayPal’s experience in data science, risk management and machine learning, the statement added.

PayPal will hire around 100 engineers across various roles from risk management to operations to provide cutting-edge digital payments solutions to customers around the world. 

The India technology centres are the largest for PayPal outside of the US, and work on technologies ranging from artificial intelligence to machine learning to blockchain.

“Through this expansion, we’re investing not only in world-class Indian technology talent but also in continuing to strengthen how we support and grow our global customer base,” Tushar Shah, senior vice president, enterprise platform and seller risk, PayPal said. 

The news of the expansion comes weeks after the company found itself in a controversy over its operations in the country. 

Earlier this month, the Delhi High Court had issued a notice to the Reserve Bank of India, the enforcement directorate and PayPal Payments while hearing a public interest litigation on the company’s ‘illegal’ status in India. The next hearing for the case is on September 18. 

“India is a key growth market for PayPal and the opening of our global technology centre in Hyderabad, the heart of innovation and technology in India, marks a significant milestone on our journey,” Guru Bhat, vice president and head engineering, PayPal India, said.

In June 2018, Paypal had acquired fraud prevention technology company Simility for $120 million in cash. 

A month later, PayPal, along with Singapore state investment firm Teamsek, had invested $125 million (Rs 843 crore then) in Indian digital retail payments platform Pine Labs.