PayPal got into small-business lending almost two years ago as an add-on for its merchants, and in May the company said its total loans had surpassed $500 million, and that it was lending out $2 million a day in the U.S. alone. But with alternative financing expanding rapidly, and PayPal having an advantage with its captive audience of retailers, I wondered just how fast PayPal’s small-business lending was growing now.
In a recent telephone interview with Darrell Esch, PayPal’s vice president and general manager of SMB lending, I posed that question, and he told me that the amount of daily lending has been “accelerating” since then. “Where we were doing $2 million before,” he says, “we have moved beyond that point.” While Esch – who joined PayPal from Bank of America – won’t say where its total loan volume is today, if you do a little math it looks like PayPal is on track to reach the billion-dollar mark in the winter.
