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SINGAPORE: PayPal, the money transfer arm of eBay, is planning to expand aggressively in the Asia Pacific region.
It wants to double its staff strength in the region to over 2,000 by the end of the year.
It has also tied up with China UnionPay and Singapore's DBS Bank to enhance its e-payment service.
PayPal has been popular service for those who buy and sell things online. The company has nearly five million active accounts in the Asia Pacific region.
Last year, it processed more than US$6 billion of transactions here, up 38 per cent from 2008. And with increasing affluence among Asians, PayPal is optimistic about its growth prospects in Asia.
Scott Thompson, president, PayPal, said: "Last March, we told our investors and analysts that we expect to double our business from the end of 2008 to 2011, and we feel very strongly that we should be able to do that.
"A lot of the growth from PayPal is coming outside North America and the fastest growing region for us is Asia Pacific."
To grow its business in Singapore, PayPal has tied up with the country's largest bank, DBS, in a two-year exclusive deal. The agreement allows four million DBS and POSB customers to now shop online by debiting their bank accounts to fund their PayPal accounts.
DBS currently has an Internet banking customer base of about 1.3 million customers, giving it about 35 per cent market share. The lender plans to leverage on its alliance with PayPal to increase its share of the online e-commerce retail space.
Rajan Raju, group executive, Consumer Banking Group, DBS, said: "We are excited about this so we have a double-digit growth in terms of our own market share on the online space. So that's what we are trying to target ourselves at."
DBS and POSB customers can start to use the service by the middle of the year.
Separately, PayPal has also linked up with China UnionPay, the largest e-payments service provider in China, to allow Chinese consumers to shop from and make payments to overseas merchants. - CNA/vm
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