Ex-PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Joins Valor Capital

Former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has been named managing partner at Valor Capital.

The firm, which says it launched the first U.S. and Latin American cross-border venture fund in 2011, announced Schulman’s appointment in a Monday (April 8) news release.

“Dan needs no introduction for those who have been in the tech industry at any point over the past thirty years,” Valor founding Partner Scott Sobel wrote, noting a series of PayPal milestones under Schulman’s nine-year tenure, including quintupling payment value from $250 billion to $1.3 trillion.

Sobel notes that Schulman’s appointment comes as the “FinTech center of gravity” is shifting to countries such as Mexico and Brazil. The Latin American region accounts for 8 percent of the world’s population and 8 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, he adds, and leads the U.S. in total numbers of internet and smartphone users.

“Given this backdrop, there is no better time to be growing our partnership and capabilities to help our founders and investors capture this opportunity, and there is no better person than Dan to help us do it,” Sobel wrote. “Dan brings an incredible track record of driving innovation, leading startups to Fortune 100 companies, and defining new forms of capitalism by investing in the financial wellbeing of his employees.”

He writes that Valor worked with Schulman — both during his time at PayPal and when he was at American Express — on projects in the region.

“Dan’s conviction in the region led him to drive PayPal’s partnership and $750 million investment in MercadoLibre,” Sobel said.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster spoke earlier this year with  Ximena Aleman, co-founder and co-CEO of Uruguayan FinTech Prometeo, on efforts to modernize Latin America’s financial services industry.

Aleman said it’s something that rests with offering a single point of data access, a single application programming interface — and by “pushing” use cases in front of others. By doing this, she said, Prometeo is unifying far-flung markets and serving as a tech enabler for financial companies.

“What we’re providing is versatile, comprehensive infrastructure that our customers can use in multiple countries at the same time,” said Aleman.

In 2018, after heading two startups and launching Prometeo, “We understood very early on that this infrastructure was quite necessary, especially if we wanted to have better financial services in Latin America,” she told Webster, adding that “we didn’t want to be a Plaid copycat.”