CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interviews Nitin Prabhu, Vice President of Small Business and Financial Services at PayPal, who discussed PayPal’s new PayPal Complete Payments solution and how it supports small businesses. Nitin explains that small businesses face challenges like customer conversion, repeat buyers, and fraud concerns. PayPal Complete Payments addresses these by offering a streamlined payment solution that accepts various payment methods, including PayPal, Apple Pay®, Google Pay™️, and 20 alternative options from around the world. With advanced fraud prevention features and enhanced tracking capabilities, this solution aims to help Canadian small businesses grow while maintaining security. It also enables cross-border trade and provides tools to help businesses reduce risks and build customer loyalty.
Nitin is a seasoned executive within the commerce, technology, product, and operations space with diverse international experience. At PayPal, Nitin and his team are tasked with helping build innovative products and services that help small and mid-sized enterprises grow and compete in today’s digital era. He is a results-oriented growth specialist with a track record of incubating products—taking them from concept to scale. Known as an intrapreneur, Nitin has closely worked with global Fortune 1000 banks, acquirers, processors, issuers, networks, wallet, e-commerce platforms, start-ups, regulators, social and messaging platforms, and retailers. Nitin is an avid investor and advisor to early-stage companies.
Can you elaborate on how PayPal’s suite of financial services, especially the new PayPal Complete Payments solution, is positioned to address the unique challenges faced by small businesses today, and how this aligns with PayPal’s mission of democratizing financial services?
Through the pandemic, small businesses realized they needed to undergo digital transformation and launch e-commerce websites, sell via online platforms, social or mobile channels as that’s where consumers were shopping.
The reality is that small businesses face intense challenges as they grow and scale. They worry about how to convert customers from browsing to buying, how do they get repeat buyers, and how do they tackle safety and fraud concerns. To address some of these common challenges, we launched PayPal Complete Payments, our most advanced and one-stop-shop solution for Canadian businesses of all sizes. This solution enables small businesses in Canada to accept a range of payments including PayPal, Apple Pay®, Google Pay™️, credit and debit cards, and more than 20 alternative payment methods from around the world.
We’ve added features that enable businesses to get repeat buyers and reduce fraud and chargebacks. We’ve streamlined our offerings to help Canadian businesses grow. Our goal was to reduce the complexity that businesses deal with in having to approach multiple commerce and payment vendors. Now they can process card payments directly on their website and customize the checkout experience to match the look and feel of their brand, all through one single integration with PayPal.
Given your extensive background in incubating and scaling innovative products, what was the inspiration behind the development of PayPal Complete Payments, and how does it stand out from other payment solutions currently available to small businesses?
Innovation starts with the customer and a deep understanding of their needs – both the ones they tell you about, and the ones you identify based on anticipating their needs. That’s our mindset, and it sits at the heart of PayPal’s culture. Customers’ needs point us to where we should focus our resources, so that our product teams solve for what matters most.
It’s critical that no matter how cutting edge a product is, it must be rooted in a customer need. At PayPal, we’re motivated by the impact our products have on people’s lives and the financial and mental wellness of business owners. Every decision we take, we imagine the customer is in the room with us.
One key area where we heard Canadian businesses loud and clear is that they want to expand their sales to the US and internationally. The US is a major market for many Canadian small businesses. To promote cross-border trade more easily through this solution, eligible Canadian small businesses can now hold and withdraw money into their bank accounts in US dollar and accept payments in more than 20 other currencies.
A key area of differentiation is our focus on helping cross-border trade grow for Canadian ecommerce businesses. PayPal Complete Payments provides faster access to 140 plus currencies in a single wallet with no account minimums and no management of multiple accounts. PayPal stands out with 25 settlement currencies and business relationships in over 200 countries.
Another feature is that with our latest solution, we help mitigate currency risks and ensure assured cash flows. Guaranteed forward rates are offered to mitigate foreign exchange (FX) risk. PayPal’s FX service eliminates foreign exchange risk by converting funds into merchants’ preferred settlement currency at the same rate displayed to the cardholder at the point of transaction.
How does your approach as an intrapreneur within PayPal drive the development of innovative value propositions and use cases for small businesses? Can you share an example of how strategic insight led to a significant breakthrough in your product offerings?
An area of concern for many ecommerce businesses is cybersecurity. For large enterprises, we had an advanced solution. We wanted to offer that for small and mid-sized customers. PayPal Complete Payments now allows consumers to securely save their payment information on a business’s ecommerce website for future purchases. This reduces friction and drives customer conversions. By letting PayPal help manage some of the business’s PCI compliance for the storage of financial instruments, businesses are better able to manage risk and complexity of their businesses. Small businesses can now save multiple payment methods—including PayPal and credit cards—in the PayPal vault. Once saved, these payment methods remain fresh via PayPal’s real-time account updater service and network tokens, which can help reduce credit card declines and drive conversions by automatically updating lost, stolen, or expired cards-on-file.
PayPal operates in over 200 markets worldwide. How does PayPal Complete Payments cater to the needs of small businesses across different geographies while ensuring local relevance and compliance with regional regulations?
What sets PayPal apart from any of our peers in the digital payment space is that we have a long history of being a trusted partner to consumers and businesses. PayPal’s business around the world is governed by constantly changing policies, laws, and regulations. To serve our customers in over 200 markets, we have constant ongoing dialogues with regulatory bodies and work closely with them to comply with relevant regulations to protect people and business owners.
Looking ahead, what are some of the emerging trends or technologies you believe will significantly impact the financial services landscape for small businesses, and how is PayPal positioning itself to lead or adapt to these changes?
In the world of commerce, customer conversions are everything. Our teams are focused on helping customers drive greater conversions at the point of checkout. We have a bold vision and mission to take commerce to the next level as the world experiences the next breakthrough in technology: the age of AI.
Today, we’re working to leverage AI to unearth customer insights that weren’t previously possible, enabling businesses, no matter their size, to engage more deeply with customers through highly personalized shopping experiences. We’ll be instrumental in helping businesses “know” their customers better than before.
We are reimagining checkout to be super-fast and seamless. This is just the beginning. We’ll fundamentally change how people shop and save, and how businesses engage with and acquire customers to grow their business – as only PayPal can. We’ll help lead this next chapter in global commerce because we have the trust of consumers and merchants, which is something we’ve earned through our steadfast safety and security measures.
As we add greater convenience and personalization, protecting our customers’ privacy continues to be a cornerstone. Trust and security are intrinsic to PayPal.
