10 Facts About Paypal You Probably Didn’t Know About

When it comes to making payments online for overseas transactions, you know there’s one secure website that’s got you covered. Good old PayPal.

How much do you actually know about the company, though? Here are 10 fun facts that you wish you’d known sooner!

PayPal Was Spawned Through Confinity
Never heard of Confinity? Well, this company specialized in developing security software for handheld devices. PayPal was created a year later to assist in Confinity’s money transfer services.

Peter Thiel, the Founder with a Plan that Gets Kids to Leave School
Under the Thiel Fellowship, twenty 20-year old teenagers/young adults are given US$100,000 in a time-span of 2 years if they choose to drop out of school and pursue their business dreams.

You’ll Never Guess Where Its Operation Center’s Located!
While the headquarters for PayPal is in Silicon Valley, the operations centre is actually somewhere completely unexpected. Nebraska. That’s still in the US, but not as “sexy” as Silicon Valley.

Three Countries That Can’t Use PayPal’s Services
PayPal doesn’t work in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. The company also refuses to serve a number of other countries listed on America’s economic sanction list, which I think you know where is is.

You Can Hold Up to How Many Different Currencies Again?
Not 10. Not 15. But 26 different currencies on an account at any given time. Wah, so many. I thought I’m being crazy by holding on to SGD, RM and USD.

The Creators of YouTube Are From PayPal
YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees – Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. They used a mixture of PayPal’s connection and business model to bring us the most well-known video-sharing website in the history of this millennium. I mean, come on. Despacito has been shared there just more than 3 billion times already.

Peter Thiel Helped Other Startups That Are BIG, BIG Names Now
LinkedIn, Friendster and even Yelp has been part of his business ventures. Come to think of it, big game-changers seem to come together, doesn’t it?

The Creators Are Also Known As the Paypal Mafia
The company came into fruition when some employees left eBay to start their own thing. They’re then called the PayPal Mafia, which come to think of it, is pretty apt. Up until today, people still call the founders Paypal Mafia. Kinda cool, isn’t it?

Don’t Ever Call PayPal A Bank, They Don’t Like It
Some people might mistakenly label PayPal as a bank because, well, there’s so many online cashless transactions happening on its platform. Its founder has, however, insisted that it is not a bank as the company doesn’t do fractional-reserve banking. Don’t worry – we will explain the term for you.

This means that the company doesn’t accept deposits, makes loans or investments. While this also means a whole lot of other details, the most important one would probably be that PayPal does not hold an account that a bank would otherwise have with a central bank.

Numbers, Numbers
Guess how many Paypal accounts are there now? As of early 2017, there’s a totality of 197 million active accounts, and 15 million active merchant accounts. In 2015, they processed well over 4.9 billion payments. 

The amount of virtual money flowing around through bytes instead of cold, hard cash is indeed scary.