Paypal.com

PayPal 

PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. PayPal is one of the world's largest Internet payment companies. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

Established in 1998,  PayPal had its initial public offering in 2002, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year.

In 2014, eBay announced plans to spin-off PayPal into an independent company by mid-2015 and this was completed on July 18, 2015. 

eBay subsidiary (2002–2014)

Shortly after PayPal's IPO, the company was acquired by eBay in July 2002 for $1.5 billion, with a valuation of over $23 a share, or 77% above the IPO price. More than 70 percent of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly 1 in 4 closed auction listings were transacted via PayPal.  PayPal became the payment method used by a majority of eBay users (it was also the default choice), and the service competed with eBay's subsidiary Billpoint, as well as Citibank's c2it, Yahoo!'s PayDirect, Google Checkout and Western Union's BidPay service, all of which closed in subsequent years.

PayPal acquired the VeriSign payment solution in 2005 to expand its e-commerce business and provide added security support.  In 2007, PayPal announced a partnership with MasterCard that led to the development and launch of the PayPal Secure Card service, a software that allows customers to make payments on websites that do not accept PayPal directly by generating a unique, single-use MasterCard number for each checkout.  By the end of 2007, the company generated $1.8 billion in revenue.

In January 2008, PayPal acquired Fraud Sciences, a privately held Israeli start-up company with expertise in online risk tools, for $169 million, in order to enhance PayPal's proprietary fraud management systems.  In November 2008, the company acquired Bill Me Later, an online payments company offering transactional credit at over 9000 online merchants in the US. PayPal revenues for Q1 2009 were $643 million, up 11 percent year over year. 42 percent of revenues in Q1 2009 were from international markets. PayPal's Total Payment Volume (TPV), the total value of transactions in Q1 2009 was nearly $16 billion, up 10 percent year over year.

By 2010, PayPal had over 100 million active user accounts in 190 markets through 25 different currencies. In July 2011, fourteen alleged members of the Anonymous hacktivist group were charged with attempting to disrupt PayPal's operations. The denial of service attacks occurred in December 2010, after PayPal stopped processing donations to Wikileaks. On December 5, 2013, 13 of the PayPal 14 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges related to the attacks.