PayPal Strategy: Read Pandemic Shifts in How People Pay and Rank Investments by Horizon

The Covid-19 pandemic shifted people's everyday behavior and the ways they prefer to pay. Draw on publicly available data to identify those shifts and what they mean for payments, then make the case for the investments PayPal's payments platform team should fund, split into short-term and medium-term bets. ### Clarifying Questions - Does the payments platform team cover consumer checkout and wallets (PayPal and Venmo), merchant processing, or both? - What time spans should short term and medium term mean for this pitch? - Should the analysis be global, or focused on PayPal's largest markets? - Is the pitch expected to include sizing and a resource ask, or a ranked set of bets with the reasoning behind them? ### Part 1 — Identify the shifts from public data Which changes in consumer and merchant payment behavior did the pandemic bring about, which public sources show them, and which do you expect to last? ```hint Separate a spike from a step For each shift, look at what happened after stores reopened as well as during lockdowns. A change that partly reverted but stayed above its old trend makes a different investment case from one that fully reversed. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Named public sources and what each can and cannot show. - Shifts on both the consumer and the merchant side, including fraud and risk. - A judgment of how durable each shift is, backed by evidence. ### Part 2 — Pitch short- and medium-term investments Turn the insights into a pitch: which investments should the team make now, which over a longer horizon, and why is PayPal positioned to win each one? ```hint Tie each bet to a shift Every investment should trace back to a shift from Part 1 and to an advantage PayPal already holds over competitors. Rank the bets, and say what you would not fund. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - A short list of short-term and medium-term investments, each linked to a shift. - Prioritization criteria and a clear ranking. - Success metrics and the main risks for the top bets. ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear path from evidence to insight to investment, rather than a list of trends. - Lasting shifts separated from pandemic pull-forward, and how that affects the size of each bet. - Investments that use PayPal's position on both sides of its network and account for competitors. - Metrics, risks such as fraud, credit losses, regulation and overinvestment, and a recommendation the team could act on. ### Follow-up Questions - If online shopping falls back toward its pre-pandemic share, which of your bets would you cut first? - How would you protect the many first-time digital payment users from scams without adding friction at checkout? - Which medium-term bet would you build, which would you partner for, and which would you acquire?