PayPal has apparently not taken vacation this summer. After a surge of partnerships, the payments company announced it will acquire Swift Financial, a U.S.-based small business lending platform. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close later this year, were not disclosed.
Delaware-based Swift Financial has provided working capital to thousands of small businesses since launching in 2006 and has been recognized by J.D. Power for offering an “outstanding customer experience.” PayPal acquired Swift Financial to feed into PayPal Working Capital, the company’s business financing arm that launched in 2013 and has since provided more than $3 billion in funding to more than 115,000 small businesses. PayPal describes its small business financing arm as a “strategic offering” that “drives merchants’ sales growth, increases processing volume, and reduces merchant churn.”
PayPal anticipates the acquisition will help it enhance underwriting capabilities. “While PayPal Working Capital provides access to capital based exclusively on proprietary insights, Swift’s technology will allow us to assess supplemental information to more fully understand the strength of a business and provide access to complementary financing products to meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses,” Darrell Esch, PayPal VP & Commercial Officer, Global Credit said in a blog post. Furthermore, the acquisition will help PayPal accelerate its goal of democratizing financial services and will enable the company to expand its loan cap from $125,000 to $500,000.
After being acquired by eBay in 2002, PayPal split from the online auction company in 2015, launching on the NASDAQ under the ticker PYPL. So far in 2017, PayPal has been busy expanding partnerships and initiating acquisitions. Here is a flurry of news from just this April to the present:
- Partnered with Skype (August 2)
- Expanded relationship with JP Morgan Chase (July 20)
- Expanded partnership with Citibank (July 20)
- Finalized acquisition of TIO Networks (July 18)
- Expanded partnership with Samsung (July 17)
- Launched capability to pay for App Store purchases using PayPal (July 11)
- Launched instant bank account transfers (June 20)
- Enabled Android users on Chrome to authorize PayPal purchases with their fingerprint (May 17)
- Extended partnership with Google (April 18)
The company’s market cap currently sits around $70 billion. PayPal’s Braintree recently presented at FinDEVr New York 2016. The company also showcased its Instant Account Creation feature at FinovateFall 2012. The company’s second quarter revenue is up 20% year-over-year to $3.14 billion. Since the second quarter of 2016, PayPal has added 22 million active accounts and increased its mobile payment volume by 50%. Also in the second quarter of this year, Venmo payment volume was up 103% to $8 billion.