Big data is influencing nearly every aspect of our daily lives, including how we shop, eat, travel – even how we interact. To be successful in today’s digital era, companies must be able to sift through large volumes of high-velocity data to make decisions, whether it’s deciding on a new product feature or deciding if a financial transaction is fraudulent within seconds. With more than 173 million active customer accounts, PayPal is a leader at leveraging data from its unique, closed-loop network of consumers and merchants to benefit our customers. We approach our use of always-faster and more- sophisticated technologies with a disciplined awareness of security and privacy in managing the petabytes of data entrusted to us. Here’s a peek into some of the ways PayPal uses its extensive and diverse big data infrastructure, advanced analytics and all-star team of data scientists around the world to improve our customers’ experiences every day.
Helping prevent fraud: PayPal has a 16-year track record of secure online payments and is proactive in fighting fraud. We’ve built industry-leading anti-fraud and risk management technology that allows us to detect unusual activity the moment it happens and often, before it affects our customers. By combining advanced data processing with human oversight, we’re able to help keep our customers’ money moving to the right people and out of the hands of the wrong ones. Our system gets smarter with every transaction we process, enabling us to accurately establish patterns in order to trust good people and spot the bad. We’re leveraging industry-leading technologies to power our next-generation data architecture, and support core areas of our data analytics focus like graph mining (visualize trends), text analysis (extract meaning from transactions), and machine learning (predictive modeling and insights).
Providing a frictionless customer experience: PayPal continually analyzes petabytes of data from our website and mobile app interactions, so we understand how our customers use our products and identify where we can remove friction to enhance the experience for every financial transaction. A combination of large-scale data platforms and services for moving, storing, and processing large amounts of data are essential to informing our business intelligence and analytics globally.
Delivering relevant offers and opportunities: By applying advanced analytics to big data, PayPal is able to present relevant offers from merchants to consumers – such as discounts when using PayPal as payment. These customized offers, based on algorithms using past-purchase history, are presented in-context, both online and in-app, driving higher transaction volume for merchants while enabling consumers to get more value from their purchase (like saving money!).
Offering access to credit: PayPal uses proprietary data and insights to expand access to capital that small businesses need to grow and hire. With PayPal Working Capital, data is leveraged to assess creditworthiness, and underwrite and service small business loans in a way traditional lenders can’t – all within minutes. Unlike traditional sources, eligibility is based on the borrower’s PayPal history and processing volume, not their business or personal credit score. Through the innovative use of data, PayPal Working Capital has disbursed a total of $1 billion to more than 60,000 small businesses around the world.
Optimizing operations and efficiency: PayPal also relies on its data infrastructure to globally operate and optimize the core of our business, continually generating key company performance insights to gauge and forecast our company’s health. This requires continuously bringing data from across the company, allowing us to make faster, smarter decisions for our customers.
And that’s just WHAT we do with the data…HOW we do it is a different, yet equally compelling story. Our data platforms continually evolve to ensure PayPal has a trusted core of high-value data in an effective design that can be used to bootstrap new use cases as the business evolves. The layers of machine-learning algorithms and advanced data processing through our platforms, combined with human behavioral analysis are core to our risk assessment, fraud prevention, information security and credit scoring – all part and parcel to operating our business and helping to protect and serve our millions of merchants and customers who make 12.5 million payments every day.