Will PayPal Survive the Next Financial Evolution?

Times are changing – and changing fast! Just over two decades into the new millennium, our lives have changed almost beyond recognition. We have seen unprecedented changes in the way we travel, work, shop, eat, and just about everything else. Some of the biggest changes involve the way we do our banking: physical coins and notes are fast becoming part of history. Nowadays, just like almost everything else, banking is about the Internet.

What is PayPal?

Originally called Confinity, the company launched in 1998. In the early days, the main point of the company was supposed to be providing security programs for devices like cell phones and tablets, but this was not a great success. After these early failures, the company shifted its focus to the provision of digital wallets and related services.

It was a good time for a shift in focus because digital wallets and related services were fast becoming a pretty big deal. In 2002, PayPal was bought by eBay – another one of the internet companies that has been growing incredibly fast – which led to a massive increase in its value.

PayPal for Casinos

As PayPal was becoming more popular and more widespread, so was the iGaming industry. At first, PayPal was not used much within iGaming, but from about April 2020 (when a new regulation was passed on the use of credit cards in online casinos), PayPal and iGaming started to come together more than ever before.

In many ways, PayPal is the ideal platform to use for iGaming transactions:

· Players can enjoy the highest possible levels of security with PayPal

· Wallets are quick and easy to set up and use

· Payments are processed quickly

· Account and transaction fees are low.

From June 2022, PayPal jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon by enabling users not only to pay with cryptocurrencies but also to receive, transfer, and send them. The company is committed to making it easier for its customers to benefit from similar new developments in the expanding digital currency milieu.

Not all online casinos offer PayPal facilities for all their games, but most of them do. When you have a PayPal wallet, you can play progressive slots, live casino games, table games, jackpots, and almost any other game you can think of. Using PayPal is convenient and safe.

PayPal’s market performance

Around the middle of 2020, PayPal stocks were performing well. Share prices were up around 30% compared with before the pandemic, and around 90% up compared with the all-time market lows in March.

This was at least partly the result of the Covid-19 stay-at-home orders: people weren’t allowed to go shopping in person, so they switched to buying what they needed online. Other e-wallet providers also experienced growth during this period, and PayPal no longer has the monopoly it once did. Companies like Shopify, eBay, and Amazon also experienced a lot of growth during this period.

The Relative Strength Rating of a company is a measure of the strength of a certain stock compared to all the other listed companies. PayPal stock is rated 89 (out of a possible 99) on Relative Strength: that means that, over the past year, PayPal stock has been performing better than 89% of all listed companies.

Future Trends

Almost everybody has already been affected by tough economic conditions over the past few years. October 2022 was particularly bad, with some countries recording their highest inflation rates in over 40 years. High inflation means high prices, which means households have a tough time paying their monthly expenses. Even people who save every possible cent can have a tough time because they get less interest on their savings than they do when inflation is lower.

In spite of the fact that this inflation has eased off a little by now, many companies, including PayPal, lost value in the first quarter of 2023. However, outgoing PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is optimistic about the company’s future.

In particular, Schulman suggested that generative AI services, such as ChatGPT, could be used to improve the efficiency of PayPal’s software development and digital financial services. He expects a growth in profits in the next few years.

PayPal had around 377 million active users worldwide at the end of 2020 and aims to reach 750 million users by the end of 2025. Knowledgeable investors are of the opinion that PayPal shows potential for growth over a number of years, and that buying PayPal stocks at their current cheap price is a sound move.

Final Thoughts

The way things stand at present, there seems to be little doubt that the future of buying and selling will involve more and more internet technologies and less and less actual paper money. In that case, there is also not much doubt that the next few decades will see digital wallets and related services going from strength to strength. Cryptocurrencies will likely continue to increase in popularity, and PayPal is ideally placed to take advantage of this trend.