Watch: Investments in cloud enablement, security really helped (in this crisis): Guru Bhat, PayPal

PayPal, the San Jose, California headquartered digital payments giant, has over 300 million users globally. With the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating online transactions across the world, especially in developing economies such as India, the company expects to rapidly add new users to its platform. 

Some 74% of Indian consumers will prefer to carry out payments through the digital medium within the next six to nine months, according to a recent report by the Capgemini Research Institute. 

PayPal launched operations in India in 2017 and expanded its services a year later. However, it has had a presence in India for over a decade. By 2012, about 60% of its product development was reportedly done from its Chennai office. 

In February this year, the company announced that it would launch UPI (unified payments interface) based peer-to-peer payment feature to expand its local presence. With the move, PayPal will go head to head with other UPI heavyweights such as Paytm, Google Pay and PhonePe.

In an interview with TechCircle, Guru Bhat, vice president, omni channel and customer success, and general manager at PayPal India, spoke about how the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of digital payments across the world. He also outlined how key technology bets have helped it continue business amid the crisis and its future plans for India. 

“Investments in cloud enablement, security, risk management, underlying infrastructure and geo distribution, all of this has really helped PayPal this time,” Bhat said.

Bhat has been with the company since 2015, leading the technology centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. He plays a key role in building the company’s next-generation payment solutions and services.

Globally, PayPal aims to touch payment volumes of $1 trillion in the current financial year, up from $700 billion in 2019.