PayPal Accelerates Its Digital Transformation with Google Cloud to Support Customer Needs During Pandemic–and Beyond

Google Cloud infrastructure and SAP HANA databases provide foundation for scale and growth at PayPal

Google Cloud and PayPal today announced they are deepening their relationship to further accelerate PayPal’s digital transformation and evolving customer needs. Under this expanded relationship, Google Cloud will provide both infrastructure and analytics capabilities to support PayPal’s growth, helping the company process transactional data at massive scale.

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Following exponential growth since it became an independent company in 2015, PayPal set out to scale its infrastructure globally, while also creating new products and services for customers. As a major step forward in its hybrid cloud strategy, PayPal is moving more of its core infrastructure and workloads to Google Cloud. One key reason for this shift is the surge in digital commerce and user traffic triggered by the global pandemic, which led to a 24% spike in PayPal’s total active customer accounts, now totalling 392 million active users as of the end of Q1 2021.

With Google Cloud’s infrastructure solutions, PayPal was able to add capacity to their infrastructure in just hours, a process that would have otherwise taken months to complete. In addition, with the bulk of its online transactional data residing in its SAP S/4HANA database, PayPal was able to leverage SAP’s Financial Products Subledger, delivered at massive scale on Google Cloud, to quickly process transactions at high volume, as well as to analyze purchasing trends at volume with low latency.

During peak traffic times, such as heightened online shopping periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States, PayPal was able to process 1,000 payments per second, a 22% increase from 2019. Google Cloud’s ability to stagger workloads, and to scale computing resources up or down during peak and off-peak times, ensured PayPal could deliver exceptional customer experiences during these high-traffic events.

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“We can only develop fast, build fast, and deploy fast if we have infrastructure that’s as nimble as we are. By leveraging the power of the cloud, our teams can focus on providing the best products, capabilities and services to our customers,” said Wes Hummel, vice president, Site Reliability and Cloud Engineering, PayPal. “As a part of our strategic partnership, we’re working side-by-side with Google Cloud to scale and secure our infrastructure for the future.”

“E-commerce has spiked during the pandemic, with people using less cash. As a result, payments providers have been in high demand, ” said Derek White, vice president of Global Financial Services, Google Cloud. “We’re working with PayPal to leverage the power of the cloud to make shopping and e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure. And that’s a win for businesses and consumers.”

Google also recently introduced PayPal as a payment method for Google Ads and Google Workspace. By adding PayPal, Google is able to better serve PayPal’s ecosystem of consumers and merchants. This payment option, currently available in the United States and select European countries, builds on the existing payment integration with Google Play and Buy on Google, where consumers and businesses can use PayPal at checkout.