This is a surprise! eBay will be eventually replacing PayPal as its payment method with a smaller European company called Ayden. This will be phased in over time. PayPal will continue to be available on eBay until July 2023 (over five years from now), while Ayden will have most of eBay’s payments by 2021. So it’s not something disruptive from a consumer perspective as it will be rolled out over time. PayPal’s negatives among consumers are probably high enough that quite a few people may cheer rather than cry for PayPal 🙂
Ayden will launch in small scale later in 2018, and begin expanding in 2019 and later…
More details through CNBC and more discussion in the tech world nicely organized at Techmeme. Here’s eBay’s own explanation of the change in their press release…
From down in the fine print, a caveat that should be up somewhere in the second paragraph of the eBay’s grand-plan, “forward-looking” statement, lest too many get swept up in “blue skies and green lights all the way” expectations”
“Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made.”
Indeed — recalling the Edsel, “New Coke, the PCjr. and how many times in my lifetime flying automobiles/air commuting were said to be not too far in the future. Ahem.
What’s even stranger is that eBay owned PayPal for so many years and they could have made PayPal do exactly what eBay wanted!
I wonder if eBay was put off because Paypal people insisted on writing, say, “predictions” instead of the more (supposedly) impressive “forward-looking statements” and other deviations from ostentatious corporate jargon.