Business Process award winner 2010

Peter Thiel and Max Levchin co-founded a company called Confinity that in 1998 merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, to form PayPal. Thiel served as CEO and Levchin as CTO of PayPal, which enables anyone with an email address to securely send and receive online, real-time payments using a credit card or a bank account. PayPal also performs payment processing for e-commerce vendors, auction sites, and other business users.  It also serves as a platform on which developers invent customised payment solutions for consumers and businesses.

While PayPal did not create the market for online payments, its fraud prevention and risk management efforts were responsible for raising consumer confidence in making payments over the Internet. PayPal today has more than 87 million active registered accounts, supports payments in 24 currencies and is available in 190 markets around the world. Its loss rate due to fraud is a very small .28 percent.

PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by online auction company eBay in October of that year for US$1.5 billion. In the first quarter of 2009, one of the last times it reported its financial results, the total value of transactions PayPal handled was nearly US$16 billion, up 10 percent from a year earlier. Total payment volume for the quarter was US$21.4 billion, an increase of 34% year over year.

In 2008, PayPal acquired BillMeLater, a competing online payments company offering transactional credit at over 1000 online merchants in the US. Those two units account for virtually all of the Payments business unit at eBay and that unit reported revenue of $795.6 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 ended December 31

PayPal’s Mobile iPhone app was downloaded one million times in the first three weeks after it was launched in March, 2010. The application lets users split restaurant checks, collect money for events, set reminders for recurring payments, donate to their favorite causes and manage their PayPal accounts.

PayPal has received more than 20 awards for excellence including the 2007 Online Safety Leadership Award by the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance, the 2006 Webby People's Voice Award for the Best Financial Services Site and the Electronic Payments International Award for Best Non-Card Payment Product 2005.

Thiel today is an investor and entrepreneur who works to accelerate innovation by identifying and funding promising technology ideas and by guiding successful companies to scale and dominate their industries. He co-founded Palantir Technologies and also made the first outside investment in Facebook and serves on its board. Levchin was most recently the CEO and founder of Slide, a leading social entertainment company acquired by Google Inc. in August 2010. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board.