PayPal, eBay CEOs Talk Life Outside Each Other

Although their companies have gone their separate ways, the CEOs of PayPal and eBay would have you know that they’re each doing just fine.

Last week, Daniel Schulman, chief executive of PayPal, and Devin Wenig, chief executive of eBay, spoke separately — but positively — to CNBC about their respective companies’ directions seven months after the online payments service spun off from the online marketplace. (The interviews occurred while both CEOs were in attendance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.)

Schulman, for his part, told the outlet that PayPal’s transition to a standalone company is going smoothly.

“We set up a completely new corporate network and moved thousands of servers and into our own data centers,” he commented. “So, it was a massive technological split that we had to do, but it went quite well.”

According to what Wenig told CNBC, eBay is focused on rebranding.

“We’re executing a long-term plan to reposition the business,” he remarked. “EBay without PayPal is a different company, and we came to the conclusion early on that we just need to be very different.”

Describing eBay as “a much more emotional brand” than eCommerce juggernaut Amazon, Wenig told CNBC that his company “doesn’t want to compete [with Amazon] in logistics. We’re never going to be good at that, and I don’t want to be almost as good as ‘fill in the blank.’ I want to be a better eBay.”

Looking to buck the perception of eBay as an online auction site, Wenig added in the interview that ”80 percent of everything we sell is new; 80 percent of it is [a] fixed price.” The company’s purported new direction notwithstanding, the eBay CEO told CNBC that he is “absolutely” worried about future competition from Alibaba in the U.S.

As for potential rivals that the newly independent PayPal is keeping an eye on, Schulman remarked to the outlet: “The biggest competitor that I see is cash. [Roughly] 85 percent of the world’s transactions are still in cash today.”