Will international money transfers boost PayPal?
Online payments giant PayPal reports third quarter earnings Wednesday. The firm was spun off from eBay earlier this summer. And analysts are keen to hear more about its performance as a payment option in stores.
“That to me is the long-term challenge for PayPal is really be more competitive with Apple Pay and Android Pay at stores,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
Munster will also be looking at how PayPal’s acquisition of a company called Xoom is going. The move pushed it into the international money transfer market, allowing customers to send money from the United States to their families in places like Mexico or India. The U.S. is the biggest source of international remittances.
“Ultimately we think something like Xoom could become 10 percent of PayPal’s business,” Munster said.
But PayPal’s Xoom is about a sixth of the size of competitor Western Union’s online presence, according to Mark Palmer, a financial analyst at BTIG.
“The question is how quickly can it grow on a global scale,” Palmer said.
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