Payments giant PayPal Inc begins to gain headway in the fast-growing credit method as it reported that the volumes on the ‘buy now, pay later’ platform of the company were five times higher on Black Friday compared to the same period a year ago, according to the company’s chief executive.

PayPal entered the highly competitive loan area with its “Buy in 4” platform in August of last year.

“We saw a 400% year-on-year rise on our volumes going through ‘buy now, pay later’ this past Black Friday,” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said. “It’s booming right now.” He added that more than 9 million people have used its service.

Black Friday is an unofficial shopping holiday that occurs in late November, the day following the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

“We had more than 1 million first-time users for the first time ever in the month of November,” Schulman said. “It’s not just popular but accelerating in popularity.”

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services have expanded in prominence in line with the pandemic’s increase in e-commerce volumes. Regulators, on the other hand, have expressed worry that they may lead to more debt, particularly among younger customers.

According to a poll released in September, a third of Americans who utilised “buy now, pay later” programmes had fallen behind on one or more payments. find out more

According to Schulman, the size of PayPal’s client base allowed them to provide the service responsibly.

“We have 400 million-plus people on our platform. We know consumers and we know merchants and we know when someone can responsibly borrow,” Schulman said.

“We have one of the highest approval rates and one of the lowest default rates in the industry”.

PayPal Holdings Inc. President and CEO Dan Schulman attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, on June 16, 2017. REUTERS/File Photo/Benoit Tessier

PayPal Holdings Inc. President and CEO Dan Schulman attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris, France, on June 16, 2017. REUTERS/File Photo/Benoit Tessier

Schulman would not comment on PayPal’s interest in Pinterest Inc (PINS.N) following rumours last month that the company was considering buying the social media platform for $45 billion in one of the biggest tech acquisitions ever.

He did say, though, that the corporation was open to big and small acquisitions since it has $20 billion in cash-like equivalents on its balance sheet.

“When I think about M&A or I think about the strategy of PayPal, I try to think expansively about where is the world going. Not just where the world was but where it is going,” he said.

“We have the wherewithal to be acquisitive, no doubt we will be acquisitive and we will look at both small and larger acquisitions but we have very strict capital allocation requirements.”

Deals of interest, he suggested, would be in sectors involving payment connectivity, consumer financial services, and shopping tools.

PayPal was one of the first large mainstream financial institutions to adopt cryptocurrencies last year, when it let clients to purchase, trade, and keep specific digital coins in its wallet, causing bitcoin to surge.

However, compared to working on the creation of other types of digital money and central bank digital currencies, Schulman said enabling consumers to acquire and keep cryptocurrencies is likely “the least exciting” component of crypto to him (CBDCs).

“There’s a lot of fascination when bitcoin hit $100k or is worth $25k or whatever but it will be what it will be,” he said.

“But what’s really interesting to me is can crypto or digital forms of currency add incremental utility to payments – things like programmable money, things like NFTs (non-fungible tokens), things like some Defi (decentralised finance) applications.” (Adapted from CNBC.com)

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