Don Kingsborough has resigned from PayPal after four years “a little frustrated” concerning the speed of the payment platform’s adoption in bricks and mortar stores.
While Kingsborough, who left a month ago, but is only making his departure public now, leaves on good terms with his peers, he told the tech news site re/code, “I think we were able to move the needle, but I have to say, I leave a little frustrated in that I wish we as an executive team would have done more.”
While Paypal had some success at adoption in some conventional stores such as Home Depot, its presence was not as pervasive in offline retailers and Kingsborough had anticipated, “I think we didn’t stay on the strategy, and therefore, we didn’t accomplish as much as we should have.” One of the strategies that should have been emphasized more, he said, was encouraging people who shopped online to use Paypal in regular stores. Kingsborough said he had wanted to leave this summer, but wanted to stay until Paypal had found a replacement for outgoing CEO David Marcus, who will be replaced by Dan Schulman when Paypal splits from eBay.
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Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, who has since started on online loan company Affirm, believes that younger shoppers will ditch credit cards in favor of online payments. Perhaps Levchin is right, and Paypal needs to find a new strategy or consumers prefer other services to Paypal when they are shopping offline. If credit cards are a habit, maybe younger shoppers will be less addicted to plastic.