This morning, PayPal Holdings Inc. ( NASDAQ:PYPL ) has extended its team of directors and brought on board a tech and financial venture veteran, Wences Casares. The new director is expected to add great value in terms of money and technology to the company because of similar interests in the creation of variants for money and ways to make money, more manageable.
The addition of Mr. Casares, who is the former CEO of digital-wallet firm Lemon Inc, is likely to help PayPal in its crypto-currency initiative. The online payment giant will utilize Casares’s entrepreneurial experience in alternative currency.
In 2015, PayPal had made payments through bitcoin acceptable for merchants of digital goods. Similarly, its recent appointment could help create additional tools and services that help to attain the trust of vendors and individuals, to trade bitcoin or some other alternative currency fearlessly.
With this appointment, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman hopes to exploit the potential in digital currencies. Mr. Casares has already displayed his credibility to exploit digital currency markets, when he went on to open one digital wallet company after another.
Another motive behind asking Casares to come on board could be to utilize his FinTech experience, to attain competitive edge over rivals including MasterCard, Europay, and Visa (EMV). Moreover, the appointment could be to leverage, in some way PayPal’s Venmo service; a digital wallet that allows peer-to-peer money exchange between two users anywhere.
One possibility is that they might remove transaction fee on international money by replacing it with bitcoins. Mr. Casares can also help integrate bitcoin as one of the primary currencies of exchange on Venmo. Whatever the case, we can certainly expect PayPal to roll out some new features in the coming periods.
