Dan Schulman is very enthusiastic about the difference that digital assets can make in the coming decade.
“In the next five to 10 years, you’re going to see more change in the financial system than you have over the past 10 to 20 years.”
Schulman said international remittances cost an average of 2.8% — noting that the “take rate” can be four times that for the less affluent, while the wealthy pay less than one tenth.
Schulman said that the move into crypto took six years, waiting for it to become more mainstream before trying to connect with customers and regulators. At the time, he said, cryptocurrencies “were too volatile to be a viable currency. And it was still a little bit too much of people not really understanding what they were going to get into.”
Bad Actors or Bad Privacy?
In discussing how PayPal protects customers from bad actors and cyber-theft, Schulman revealed that PayPal’s use of Big Data profiles of its customers gives it an immense amount of information about its customers — likely more than many realize:
“[I]t’s not your username and password that’s giving you permission to do that. It is 130 different variables that we look at on every single transaction, in milliseconds, to be sure that it’s you. It’s this idea of Big Data of really understanding who you are, not who you said you are. Things like two-factor authentication, that’s grade-school stuff. It needs to be much, much more sophisticated than that.”