PayPal Looks for More Strategic Investments After Uber Deal

(Bloomberg) -- The chief executive officer of PayPal Holdings Inc. said he would make more strategic deals similar to the recent $500 million investment in Uber Technologies Inc.

PayPal agreed to buy Uber’s stock in a private placement in April, prior to the ride-hailing giant’s initial public offering. Dan Schulman said the payments company is a long-term investor, and was still keen on building new products with Uber.

"We’re not investment bankers, we’re investors in relationships," Schulman said. "We’d do something like that all day long."

PayPal is now also providing more than $1 billion of working capital loans to small businesses every quarter, Schulman told Bloomberg’s Brad Stone at the Sooner Than You Think conference in London on Tuesday.

“When we loan to a small business, we’ve seen their average sales go up by 20% or more,” he added.

About $10 billion of small business loans have now been made, he said, adding that about a quarter of the U.S. cities it lends in tend to have been those with large numbers of branch closures of major banks.

In April, PayPal released first-quarter results that showed rising sales and profit but a decline in payment volume growth. But the stock has gained more than 35% for the year to date, and the CEO said Tuesday it was partly due to how diverse the company had become.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nate Lanxon in London at nlanxon@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz

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