PayPal has over 137 million active accounts in 193 markets and 25 currencies worldwide. Paypal was founded in 1998 and has offices worldwide. 2010 opened Paypal regional offices in Stockholm for the Scandinavian market. The company has been owned since 2002 by the auction site Ebay.
Paypal's turnover in 2012 was 5.6 billion US dollars and the total payment volume, the total value of transactions, was 97 billion US dollars, an increase of 25 percent compared with the previous year.
PayPal acts as an intermediary for payments by payers and recipients connects one or more debit to the account, or transfer money from one bank account to an account with Paypal. When you pay with PayPal, the money from Paypal account, if there is money there, or else directly from your bank account or credit card. Money to get to the Paypal account, free of charge transferred to the personal bank account.
The payment data entered is encrypted and stored on PayPal's servers and will not be disclosed to the websites the customer is in. Paypal also offers buyer and merchant protection.
PayPal restricts occasional access to the account, sometimes without giving any reasons, which means that the user can not carry out any transactions. To abolish the restriction required that the user confirms their address and identity by sending a copy of an identity document, and leaves out a kontoudrag well as the credit card number.
PayPal performs a fee payment processes for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users. Sometimes Paypal also a charge for the cost of the transaction upon receipt of money
(a share of the transferred money plus an additional fixed amount). The fees required depends on the currency, the way to pay, the sender's country, recipient country, amount of money sent and the recipient's account type. [4] Moreover, eBay purchases made with credit cards made through PayPal lead to a
"foreign transaction fee" if the seller is located in another country because the credit card issuer automatically informed of vendor origin.
PayPal's headquarters in San Jose, California
On 3 October 2002, Paypal owned subsidiary of Ebay. The company's headquarters is located in San Jose in California at Ebay's subsidiary office on North First Street. Paypal also has significant operations in Omaha, Phoenix and Austin in the United States, Chennai, Dublin, Berlin and Tel-Aviv. Since July 2007 engaged in Paypal even a Luxembourg-based bank.
The company continues to focus on international growth and growth of its Merchant Services division that enables online payments for retailers off eBay.
Sweden's government authorities may not use the payment service Paypal, neither of paying or receiving payment. The payment service do not fall under the framework contract for payment services Debt Office procured. Authorities when they order over the Internet, are instead paying by card. According to the Directive, the remuneration to the authority, be inserted directly on the Authority's bank account in a bank, to avoid loss of interest.
Today Paypal is the result of a merging between Confinity and X.com in March 2000. Confinity, originally a Palm Pilot-payment and cryptography company - founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery. X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999 as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999. Both companies were located in Palo Alto, University Avenue. Confinitys website originally focused on integrating wireless payments from Palm Pilots with email payments, while X.com:s website focused on financial services with email payments.
At Confinity many of the initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review (founded by Peter Thiel), and most early engineers descended from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by
Max Levchin. For X.com Elon Musk recruited a large number of personnel with knowledge of technology and business, including many who were critical of whether the merged company would be successful as Amy Klement, Sal Giambanco, Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital, Sanjay Bhargava and
Jeremy Stoppelman.
To prevent possible access for automated fraud systems used PayPal a system (see CAPTCHA) that let users enter numbers from a blurry picture, which was named Gausebeck-Levchin test.
Ebay noted that the increasing volume of its online payments and realized that an online payment system would fit well with auctions online. EBay bought Bill Point in May 1999, before PayPal existed. Ebay did Bill Point to its official payment system and gave it the name "eBay Payments" but cut its functionality solely to payments associated with eBay auctions. Because of this was Read listed in more auctions than Bill Point. In February 2000 used the Paypal service, estimated at 200,000 daily auctions while Bill Point
(in its beta version) is only used in the 4000 auction. In April 2000, there were more than one million auctions advocated Paypal service. Paypal advanced its position and became the first dot-com company that was publicly introduced after the September 11 attacks.
In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for 1.5 billion US dollars. Paypal had previously been the payment method that more than 50 percent of eBay users chose and the service competed with Ebay's subsidiary Bill Point, Citibank c2it, whose services closed during the latter part of 2003, as well as Yahoo's PayDirect, which was closed in late 2004. Western Union announced in December 2005 that they shut down their BidPay service but the service subsequently sold in 2006 to CyberSource Corporation. BidPay subsequently ceased with their services on 31 December 2007. Some competitors offer some of PayPal's services, such as Google Checkout, Wirecard, Moneybookers, 2Checkout, CCNow and Kagi is still active despite the fact that eBay is now required that all users who are selling on Ebay's sites in Australia and the UK would offer only PayPal payments. Later changed Ebay its position and demanded that sellers who use eBay Australia has to offer Paypal as a payment option (but not necessarily as the only option). They accepted payment methods include bank deposits, checks and all: money orders, one: escrow and credit cards (processed by other than PayPal).
In January 2008, acquired Paypal Fraud Sciences, a privately owned, newly established, Israeli company with expertise in tools to manage risks online, for 169 million US dollars. The purpose of the repurchase is to enhance eBay and PayPal's proprietary fraud management systems and accelerate the development of improved fraud detection methods. In November 2008 the company acquired Bill Me Later, a company for online payment services and transaction credit to more than 1000 online merchants in the US.
During the first part of 2006, the Paypal an optional security key as an additional safeguard against fraud. A user account tied to a security key has a different logon process: the account holder, key in the login ID and password as usual but will then be invited to press the button on the Security Key and enter the six-digit number generated by it. This two-step authentication is intended to prevent an account from being compromised by a malicious third party without access to the physical security key. However, the user
(or a malicious third party) alternatively authenticate by providing the credit card or bank account number that is linked to the account. Thus offering the Paypal system is not the certainty of a genuine step authentication has.
The key currently costs a one time fee of US $ 5 to all users. The possibility of using a security key with one's account is currently available only to users registered in Australia, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom and United States.
It is also possible to use a mobile phone to receive an MTA (Mobile Transaction Authentication Number) via SMS, however this security scheme known weaknesses.