text: The Growing Business of PayPal – Centhrone Investment Research
  Jul 6, 2017 | Posted by	Centhrone | Fundamental Analysis	|
  PayPal's user base is growing at double-digit rates and already reached almost 200 million users. And the company is transforming itself from a products company to being a platform as an ecosystem.
  The company has partnered with its rivals Visa and Mastercard and, thereof, gained an advantage to compete with Apple and Square. But PayPal also tries to convert other rivals Apple Pay and Google Wallet to the partners by integrating them into its platform.
  PayPal uses two-sided platform which connects merchants and consumers. The PayPal's platform provides several competitive advantages:
  PayPal focuses on growing its base of large merchants. To achieve this goal, the company has offered the merchant-oriented app as a tool to make business operations, like invoicing or refunding, easier and simpler.
  PayPal also helps merchants to identify their high-value customers which can increase the sales of the merchants. In this case, having a large user base and using it to collect the data about customer's behaviour is a very important competitive advantage.