Italy, a country that loves charity. It is the most singular data that emerges from the analysis that PayPal does, the American digital payment and money transfer services company that has been independent from its parent company eBay since July 2015. “A peculiarity of Italy that we do not know how to explain – says Cameron McLean, vice president responsible for the commercial growth of the company in Europe and Australia -. It is that donations to non-profit organizations are a more popular category with you: one of the top five types of vertical market, the highest among all European countries“.
Pandemic effect
Italy is a country that is being digitized. The pandemic, the growth of infrastructure, the availability of new technologies and ecommerce are changing the way payments are made. And, as often happens in countries that digitize with a longer delay, the latest and most modern technologies take hold. PayPal and other digital payment mechanisms (for example Stripe, Skrill and Square, but also Google Pay and Apple Pay) have become increasingly present and widespread in our country. “The Italian market is now one of the largest for PayPal but has historically been very slow. It has grown a lot in the past couple of years”Says McLean.
One of the keys is the novelty of the Buy now pay later (Bnpl). The payment system’s interest-free payment installment system (Amazon and now Apple are also offering the same mechanism) is one of the main innovations driving the spread of digital payments. “If you miss a payment – says McLean – we offer the choice of paying with various types of card the missing installments or, if there are other credit products available in the customer’s country, with one of those“.
The role of PagoPa
In Italy, however, growth is not only linked to the dynamics that emerge from fractional payments. Instead, a very strong accelerator was PayPal’s connection with PagoPa, the digital payment platform of the Italian public administration which allows you to pay fines, taxes, household consumption and much more. PagoPa is a simple and transparent system for payments to public administrations, but also a simpler way to manage and report the payments themselves, allowing public administrations to manage collections centrally with automatic reporting and reconciliation services with significant savings. in management costs.
PagoPa grew by 143% compared to 2022, has an economic value of 29 billion euros and in the first six months of 2022 it has already carried out more than 180 million transactions. For PayPal, which does not disclose more specific data, however, it is a remarkable opportunity because the payouts are on average 60% higher than those of PayPal Pay Now.
In Italy for PayPal there are 9.7 million registered users. The acceleration was the pandemic, but it’s not stopping. “We see – says McLean – constant growth: the performance statistics for Italy are very positive. Even though we left behind, in 2025, 50% of payments will be made without cash“. Italy is digitizing itself and growing a lot in this sector too.
