After former president Scott Thompson departed for the CEO role at Yahoo, PayPal has named David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, as President (PayPal acquired Zong last year for $240 million). Ebay CEO and acting PayPal president John Donahoe posted the news this morning in a blog post.
From PayPal’s blog post: [Marcus is] going to lead PayPal with that “founder’s perspective,” to bring start-up energy to PayPal’s unmatched global reach and digital payment capabilities. With David at the helm, we will have an even deeper commitment at PayPal, and across eBay Inc., to be a leading technology-driven and customer-focused product innovation company. We’ll continue to focus on accelerating product innovation, driving consumer engagement and creating a world where paying anytime, anywhere and any way is synonymous with PayPal.
Marcus started his first company, GTN telecom, back in 1996 in Geneva, Switzerland, which was acquired by World Access in 2000. That same year, he founded Echovox, a mobile media monetization company that helps large media companies connect with their mobile audiences. Zong, which was spun out of Echovox, offered a mobile payments platform, that let you pay for items online via direct billing to your mobile phone. When PayPal acquired Zong last year, Marcus became VP of mobile for the payments giant.
Considering Marcus’s extensive experience in mobile, it’s clear the direction PayPal is going when it comes to the payments experience. Last year, the company processed $4 billion in mobile payments transactions and expects $7 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012. Marcus has been focusing his efforts of late on the launch of PayPal Here, a Square-like mobile payments hardware and software platform for small businesses.
PayPal has also been hard at work on an in-store payments technology for big box retailers, which has been adopted nationally by Home Depot.
You can see Marcus introducing PayPal Here in the video below.
PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards. PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser. PayPal created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, which is an implementation...
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