PayPal, which recently shut down its domestic payments in India, on Wednesday said it continues to hire aggressively in the market which is the ‘bedrock’ of its development capabilities.
The company is working towards evolving from being a payments platform to a commerce platform, Senior Vice President (Omni Payments) at PayPay, Jim Magats, said, adding that the focus for India continues to be on small merchant businesses and enable them to do export.
“We took the decision [to exit digital payments business] for PayPal’s best interest...there are lots of providers that are in the market within India for domestic payments. I think there are very few that have the strength and capabilities that can bring cross-border and we decided to focus our efforts on where we thought we could add the most value,” he said.
Replying to a query on development capabilities in India, Mr. Magats said India is a ‘huge area’ for PayPal as far as development is concerned. “We have significant presence in Chennai and Bangalore, along with a sales and marketing office within Mumbai...our payments teams, our merchant teams, a lot of the infrastructure teams are out of India. India is literally the bedrock of our development capabilities that we have.”
Wes Hummel, VP of Site Reliability and Cloud Engineering at PayPal, added that the company continues to hire aggressively in India.
On data privacy, Mr. Hummel added that this is at the ‘top of mind’ for the firm because more and more regulations are coming in around data localization and specific regional requirements. “Our approach here is to ensure that we have data in the country, ensure that we can have either cloud presence or infrastructure present in the country to support holding that data and ensuring that data doesn’t exit the country.”
Mr. Magats stressed that the company is extremely aware about data privacy and data protection. “We’re not using data inappropriately...we’re not competing with our customers and in certain cases you’re seeing situations where certain providers are creating platforms and then when they see certain things selling well on the platform...the next day they are offering the same product at a cheaper amount. We are not using the data for our own use,” he said.
