30 October 2009
Brightlabs was caught up with the newly appointed Head of PayPal Asia Pacific and asked him a few questions about the future of PayPal in Asia.

Farhad Irani has recently been announced to lead PayPal's business in Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is one of PayPal's fastest growing regions with more than 12 million PayPal accounts. Brightlabs was fortunate enough to have caught up with Farhad and asked him a few questions about the future of PayPal in Asia.

Brightlabs: How does PayPal see the next 12 months going, given the current economic climate?
Farhad: Well, we are cautiously optimistic, especially in Asia. Underlying growth is holding up well with a host of businesses across Asia moving to the online space in a bid to create greater distribution and move to a cross border / international business model.

Brightlabs: With this growth towards international sales models, is PayPal planning to increase the service offering to its Asia Pacific clients to match the same level as that of the US?
Farhad: The plan is to drive an Asian business agenda to serve the specific needs of our identified Asian target markets. While we will indeed drive the US product platform in a bid to seek rationalisation, I would see a host of emerging technologies via the developer platform emerging within Asia in the next 2 years, especially in the mobile space. This will facilitate easier online payments and that should be quite interesting.

Brightlabs: That will be interesting, especially with the strong trend towards mobile application development and the recent release of a number of advanced handsets. Is PayPal releasing any other new products or services that people should look out for?
Absolutely, we are releasing more sophisticated products for a number of areas which includes products focused on the SME, person-to-person and business-to-business segments. We also plan to enter new Asian markets shortly. This will be facilitated via the renewed investment in people, products, marketing and operations. Asia is the future and we aim to drive towards leadership in the online and mobile payments space.

Brightlabs: Great, thanks for your time Farhad.
Farhad: My pleasure, and good luck with it all!