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I grew up in a progressive household with a family that believed in equality for all, and that leaves its mark on you. In the past, I planned to go into politics and never considered Wall Street as an option.
My team and I tried cashing checks at check-cashing places and paying bills by money order. It's incredibly inconvenient and time-consuming - it's practically a part-time job just to manage and move your money.
Personal and mobile computing, long-distance communications, energy storage, and air travel are just a few of the things that have been democratized by technology, creating new possibilities for billions of people.
Monetizing by creating more value for a Venmo user makes a ton of sense to me. But other forms of monetization that are more intrusive, like in advertising or something like that, the jury is really still out for me.
If you want to have the best employees, there really needs to be a vision and a mission. Talent looks for a mission. And if you have the best talent, that's the single biggest competitive advantage any company can have.
The digitisation of money, the rapid expansion of internet access and, of course, the adoption of mobile phones have created the perfect conditions to make it easier, secure, and affordable to save, spend, give, and borrow.
We take the privacy of our consumers' information as one of the most trusted things that people look to Paypal for, because when it comes to financial services, the single most important brand attribute you can have is trust.
It's so hard to predict the political environment. I think that business can't sit on the sidelines and just watch. I think we need to be a force for the values that we believe in. We need to partner with government and regulators.
If you think about the under-30 generation, the millennial generation - GenTech, as I call them - they grew up with a screen in front of them. And so they think about everyday processes, like payments, differently than you and I do.
In addition to my job at American Express, I'm also chairman of the board of Symantec, one of the leading players in anti-virus and cyber-crime prevention software, so I know firsthand just how sophisticated many of these attacks can be.
As CEO, I believe my most important job is to both define reality and inspire hope for the PayPal team. Defining reality includes being realistic about all the things that could go wrong so that we are prepared to navigate those challenges.
We all have people who are literally one life shock away from going into a crisis. For many of us, we have a buffer in one way or another. We have a savings account, or we have credit that we can go to. The underserved don't have that luxury.
I do think there's no substitute for really hard work. But I think the thing that launched my career at AT&T, I had a pretty tragic thing happen in my family. My sister died, and I was leading a big team at the time, and I had to take time off.
India is among the leaders in thinking about how technology can solve some of the problems about financial inclusion. But if you think that financial inclusion as a problem has a solution rooted in technology, it's obviously not the only thing.
Too many people go into existing organizations and define success as recreating what is there. To be successful as a startup organization within a large, established culture, you really need to think about how you leverage the assets that are there.
When we were associated with eBay, it was surprising to me how many merchants were very reluctant to work with PayPal because we were accessing their data and their information, and they felt in some way, shape, or form they were competing with eBay.
I think a lot of people have predicted the demise of cash, and they've frequently been wrong. But there's no question that the smartphone is leading to the digitization of money. You really now have all the power of a bank branch in the palm of your hand.
As we think about the future, one of the things we will do is to make sure PayPal becomes the central part of consumers' lives, how we enable consumers to manage and move their money more efficiently, easily, and less expensively than some traditional ways.
What we want to do to monetize Venmo is to add more and more capabilities. Anywhere you see a PayPal merchant, you can click on that button and actually use your Venmo account to check out at that merchant. Then we'll monetize that transaction exactly the same way we monetize a PayPal transaction.
Before I became the president of AT&T's consumer division, I was running strategy and our internet services, so I was the president of one of the first internet service providers, ISPs, AT&T Worldnet, and running our internet protocol product development as well. So I knew a lot about what was going on with the internet.
Most governments want their citizens to be part of the financial system, to be productive citizens as a result of having access to be able to manage and move money in a seamless way. But the traditional financial services infrastructure is not designed to handle that because, predominantly, it's an expensive infrastructure.
I think that the world is going to remain a very interconnected place. I don't think there's any getting away from that. The Internet has brought us closer together. I think cross-border trade is going to continue to grow substantially. I think there may be certain trade agreements that can be renegotiated, one way or another.
I think that sometimes people talk about disruption, and I've seen tons of startups come in as disruptors and then disappear. And I think what we need to do as an industry is think about a world that is dominated by mobile and software and not extrapolate from what was. And I think a lot of big companies tend to want to do that.
Full financial citizenship means more than just a savings account and a way to transfer money and pay bills. It also requires access to credit along with the ability to accept payments and run a business, send money to family or transact business across borders, contribute to the community and help others in need, and invest for the future.
When I talk about the ability for fintech to promote kind of economic growth and productive citizens coming in, using different data and being able to lend to small businesses, see those small businesses start to grow - of course, that means more money for their families, you know, the small-business owner families. They start to hire people.