PayPal extends Google Cloud partnership to accelerate transformation

By Sunniva Kolostyak

PayPal has announced that it is furthering its existing relationship with Google Cloud, adopting infrastructure and analytics capabilities to accelerate digital transformation and better address customer needs.

In a statement, the two companies announced that Google Cloud will support PayPal’s growth by offering solutions to process transactional data at a massive scale through a hybrid cloud strategy.

This solution has allowed the payments giant 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 has leveraged SAP’s Financial Products Subledger, delivered at massive scale on Google Cloud, to quickly process transactions at high volume, as well as to analyse purchasing trends at volume with low latency.

Commenting, Wes Hummel, vice president, Site Reliability and Cloud Engineering, PayPal, said that working strategically with Google Cloud enables scalability for the future: “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.”

PayPal has seen exponential growth since it became an independent company in 2015 and has been working to move 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 per cent spike in PayPal’s total active customer accounts, now totalling 392 million active users as of the end of Q1 2021.

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 per cent increase from 2019. With Google Cloud, PayPal could stagger workloads and scale computing resources up or down during peak and off-peak times.

“E-commerce has spiked during the pandemic, with people using less cash. As a result, payments providers have been in high demand,” Derek White, vice president of Global Financial Services, Google Cloud, said.

“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.”