Today In Data: Self-Employment, Finance Jobs And PayPal’s Woes

Today in PYMNTS data, self-employment is on the rise, finance jobs could shift out of the U.K. in the Brexit aftermath, Flywire is opening a new hub in Singapore and PayPal is taking hits since news broke that eBay would handle its own payments processing.

Here are the numbers:

32.1 million | Number of people who are now self-employed in the U.K., making up more than 15 percent of the overall workforce. That’s according to research by app-based accounting and banking platform Coconut on the landscape of financial services for the self-employed. The self-employed workforce is growing, despite hurdles like financial insecurity, lack of pension, expense tracking, tax returns and more.

10,000 | Approximate number of finance jobs that could be shifted out of the U.K. because of Brexit. Those jobs could also be created outside the market in the next few years — particularly if the nation is unable to secure relatively unobstructed access to the EU single market — according to recent research published by Morgan McKinley Financial Services. The report found a 37 percent decline in new financial jobs in London last month and attributed that decline to Brexit.

100 percent | Growth of international payments solution Flywire’s business in the Asia-Pacific region over the last year. Asia-Pacific is the firm’s largest market for payers who come mostly from China, India and South Korea. Flywire is opening a regional hub in Singapore, creating a presence in a region that drives 65 percent of its payments volume.

22 percent | Portion of PayPal’s 2016 revenue attributed to eBay, down from 26 percent in 2015 and 29 percent in 2014. Last year, eBay’s transactions represented 13 percent of the total, compared to 16 percent for the fourth quarter of 2016 and 29 percent in 2014.

12 percent | Decline in PayPal shares in after-hours trading following the announcement that eBay would intermediate its own payments. The eCommerce platform has made moves to bring payments between buyers and sellers into its own orbit and has struck a deal to bring global payment company Adyen on board as its payments processor.