PayPal CEO Says Credit Cards On The Path To Extinction

PayPal’s CEO believes that in 20 years, credit cards will no longer exist.

Dan Schulman said that as the popularity of PayPal and its mobile payments platform Venmo grow, traditional methods of payment will be replaced by digital alternatives.

“Twenty years from now, there will be no more credit cards, really,” Schulman said at TheStreet’s Investor Boot Camp conference in New York. “Why have them when you can have a QR code or NCR tablet?”

Schulman became president of PayPal in 2014 and has been CEO since 2015.

He also spoke about blockchain technology, revealing that while he is a believer in it, PayPal and Venmo do not offer cryptocurrency exchange in order to protect users.

“We don’t want to be a part of consumers losing large amounts of money,” Schulman said.

PayPal does allow users to transfer digital currency from Coinbase after it has been changed into fiat currency, “but we’re not going to help mostly scammers hurt consumers around this,” he added.

And while Amazon has launched Amazon Payments to compete with PayPal, and digital payments app Zelle is taking on Venmo, Schulman noted that competition “is like gravity — there’s always competition around.”

“No one company is going to own digital payment companies, that’s for sure,” he said.

He also pointed out that Zelle’s average transaction size is about $300 and happens about once a month, while Venmo users transfer smaller amounts of money more frequently — around four to six times a week.

“I never ever downplay what my competitor is doing,” Schulman said. “I think we have a healthy degree of paranoia.”

It makes sense, though, that Schulman isn’t sweating the competition. Last week it was reported that a new study found that PayPal checkout converts at 88.7 percent – 82 percent higher than a checkout without PayPal, including other digital wallets and cards.

PayPal also released the findings of a new mobile-focused survey of consumers, which said that 52 percent of mobile customers made more online purchases/transactions because PayPal was offered as a checkout option.

“PayPal is unique in that it’s the only payments player that operates at scale, globally, on both the consumer and merchant side of the ecosystem, with the ability to deliver great end-to-end buying experiences,” the company said in a statement. “Because of this, we’re able to offer experiences that others cannot, and we can do so oftentimes without requiring merchants to do any additional integration work.”