LONDON– PayPal has become the largest non-bank lender in the world with $54.27 billion in total assets, according to a new report.
TradingPlatforms.com, analyzing what it said is the growing popularity of alternatives to traditional lenders, said non-bank lenders such as PayPal aim to be the source of funding for these businesses often having less stringent requirements.
As of May 2020, PayPal was also ranked as the 54th largest company based on market capitalization with a market cap of $144.3 billion. PayPal’s total assets alone make up almost 60% of the top 10 non-bank lenders’ total assets combined, TradingPlatforms.com said.
Increase in Users
According to TradingPlatforms.com, monthly Active Users (MUA) for PayPal had actually been in the decline in the U.K. since February 2017, but the decline was halted through a surge in PayPal’s popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that it imposed on many developed markets. In the U.K., PayPal grew by about a million MUA since April 2020 from 2.05 million MUA to 2.95 million in January 2021, TradingPlatforms.com added. As of Q4 of 2020, PayPal reported 377 million active registered accounts globally, a 24% YoY increase from Q4 2019 (305 million), it added.
2020 Was A Record Year for PayPal Worldwide
“The company also experienced a record year in 2020 as digital payment options became a popular alternative to traditional, physical banks during the pandemic,” TradingPlatforms.com reported. “PayPal’s annual revenue for 2020 increased by over 20% YoY to $21.45 billion. In the final quarter of 2020 alone PayPal handled $277 billion in total payment volume taking their total payment volume for 2020 to $936 billion - a growth of nearly a third YoY.”
PayPal also transacted more payments than ever before growing 25% YoY to 15.4 million transactions in 2020, it added.
Largest Non-Banking Institutions Have Overtaken “Big Six” Banks in America
According to TradingPlatforms.com, non-banking institutions such as PayPal have become an integral part of the economy in the most developed markets. In the U.S. the market cap of four large fintech companies; Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Square combined for more than $1 trillion. This eclipsed the combined $880 billion market cap of the traditional “Big Six” banks in America: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, the report added.