America's Road to Fame

Chapter 250 Payment Business
"What are you thinking, William, we're still..."

Speaking of this, Rick stopped a little embarrassed, and said, "It's not what you think anyway."

"Wait, Rick, what did you say about you just now?" William Chen looked at Rick a lot, and said meaningfully:

"Don't tell me that you haven't slept with her yet."

"Uh, that's not the point, William." Rick said with a somewhat unnatural expression, "I'm a devout Catholic, so..."

"Okay, but you are too sudden, which made me think you guys got in the car first, and you have to get your driver's license back after an accident." Since it was an issue of belief, Chen William couldn't make any more jokes.

"It's just the contact during this period of time. We believe that each other is someone who can go on forever." Rick said angrily: "But you have to pay attention, William, in case you really have a child."

"That's right, it's not that I can't afford it."

"Hehe." Hearing William Chen's words, Rick Walton sneered and said, "You have so many women, if they get pregnant together by then, the situation will be interesting."

"Brother, can you stop being so crow-mouthed? I feel that you are envious of my beauty. Are you a person who is about to enter the grave of marriage, and is making the final struggle?"

William Chen said to Rick angrily, how could this be possible...

After sending Rick Walton away, William Chen approached Nelson and asked about PayPal. The previous investigation on PayPal let William Chen know that the current payment on the mobile terminal is becoming more and more competitive, but currently Although Paypal has an advantage, the advantage is not great. Their main users still come from eBay, mainly for payment on the web page.

At the beginning, PayPal really wanted to be a payment tool for mobile phones, but later it encountered difficulties in development. After being acquired by eBay, they got a huge amount of transactions, and therefore found that users at that time preferred to use PayPal on the web page, so After that, they slowed down the pace of development on the mobile side, but temporarily focused on the payment field on the web side.

It was not until 2008 that they began to continue to develop towards the mobile terminal, but at present, various giants, including Facebook and Google, have plans to enter the mobile payment terminal and launch their own payment tools.

So in summary, it is not easy to acquire PayPal from eBay. Even if it can be acquired, the price will not be too low, and it may reach tens of billions, because PayPal is too important to eBay, and they may not even agree to completely sell their own hands. stock.

And if Chen William is more concerned about the field of mobile payment, then spending more than [-] billion yuan to acquire PayPal may not be too cost-effective. Now there are many start-up companies that are doing well in these areas. It is better to acquire these companies Come down, get relevant talents, and then combine with their Internet projects under the Meta technology company to develop their own payment system.

After thinking about it, William Chen decided to do both. On the one hand, he would continue to contact eBay to discuss the feasibility of acquiring PayPal, and on the other hand, he would acquire potential start-up companies to prepare for the development of Meta Technology’s free payment system.

The mobile payment startups that Chen William acquired were candidates, including Zong, Venmo and Square.

Zong was originally a division of Echovox, a provider of mobile advertising solutions. Later, with the development of the virtual currency industry, Zong was spun off from Echovox and became an independent company. Zong's service helps social gamers purchase in-game virtual items.

Zong, which charges 5% to 10% of each transaction, is expected to quadruple its revenue this year to last year, with payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

Therefore, this company still has great potential for development. At this time, Zong had just received more than US$1000 million in Series A financing at the end of last year. Between $5000-1 million.

In comparison, Venmo is smaller. This company was founded just last year. It is a p2p micropayment software. Users can use Venmo to deal with money problems among friends. It is more popular among young people. Popular, but at this time Venmo still uses more text messages for payment, which is still relatively backward, but the social attributes of this company are still very attractive to young people. Users can already share themselves through Facebook and other social media. A record of Venmo payments.

Because Venmo has just started a business, the acquisition price will not be very high. According to estimates, 1000 million US dollars is enough to win the company.

As for Square, it has something to do with William Chen, because the founder of this company is Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter.When Chen William acquired Twitter, Jack Dorsey had already left the position of CEO of the company and only retained a part of the shares.

Afterwards, he started his own business again and founded Square. If you simply understand it, Square is more similar to La Cala in the United States. At first, it launched a credit card reader for mobile phones to help small merchants solve the trouble of customers paying with credit cards.

As mentioned before, in the United States, people are more accustomed to using credit cards to pay, and the development of mobile payment is not as fast as that in Huaguo, because in many people's eyes, the only difference between the two is whether you use a credit card to swipe, or The difference between swiping with a mobile phone.

Especially in the promotion of physical stores, mobile payment is particularly difficult. When paying through the Internet, these payment software have the advantage of being convenient and fast for credit cards. In physical payment, credit cards are already used by the public in Europe and the United States. way out.

Generally speaking, credit card fees are still relatively high. In the United States, the fee is about 6%. Merchants are quite a headache.

And Square can lower the credit card rate, usually between 2.5-3%, which can save half or more of the credit card fee, which is very popular with many merchants.

And Square uses the mini card reader on the mobile phone to charge the merchant only 9.9 US dollars, and after the merchant uses it for the first time, he can also get a 10 US dollar rebate, which is equivalent to a free gift, which is also more expensive than hundreds of dollars. The swipe card of the swipe card is much cheaper, so Square grew very quickly initially, gaining a large number of users.

Of course, it can also be seen from this model that it was very difficult for Square to make a profit in the early days, and it has been maintaining its development through continuous financing. Hungry.

However, William Chen had to face two issues in the acquisition of Square. The first was whether the founder of the company would accept his acquisition after being liquidated by William Chen at Twitter; the other was Chen Weilian knows that, taking Huaguo as an example, the most convenient way of mobile payment is to pay through QR codes, so is it necessary to acquire Square at the current stage and make the transition with a mobile card reader?
No matter what, William Chen will give it a try. After all, he knows that the company Square will develop well in the future. After a successful IPO, it is the two largest payment giants in the United States alongside PayPal. Therefore, even if it cannot be fully acquired now, a part of the investment will be completed. It can also make a lot of money, and it can also maintain a certain influence in this company.

As for the two companies Zong and Venmo, William Chen has decided to acquire them.If I remember correctly, it seems that both Zong and Venmo were later acquired by PayPal, so even if he cannot acquire PayPal, he can use this as a basis to develop his own payment system.

In addition, don’t forget that William Chen also has another payment tool, Alipay. Although Alipay has spun off Ali, according to his agreement with Boss Ma, before Alipay’s IPO in the future, he will compensate a certain share of shares.

The future development of Alipay can be more complete than these payment companies in the United States. Therefore, even if he cannot acquire PayPal and Square, he can still cooperate with Alipay after winning Zong and Venmo, and the two parties will jointly develop the payment field. Research to improve the security and convenience of your own payment system.

With these plans in place, William Chen made arrangements to contact the acquisitions of these four companies. Zong and Venmo must be acquired, and the remaining two depend on luck.

(End of this chapter)