SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- PayPal Holdings, Inc., one of the world's largest Internet payment companies, said Thursday it would acquire Swift Financial Corp., an online lender in the United States, to expand market access.
Headquartered in San Jose, Northern California, PayPal said the move is part of its efforts to support small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Swift Financial, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, has provided funding to over 20,000 businesses through loans and advances in the United States by combining data, technology and customer service.
While announcing the acquisition, Darrell Esch, vice president of PayPal, posted a message on the company's website, saying the deal is expected to close later in the year.
As PayPal's own business financing product, PayPal Working Capital has provided access to more than 3 billion U.S. dollars in funding to more than 115,000 small businesses since its launch in 2013. However, according to Esch, it is based exclusively on proprietary insights. And Swift Financial's technology will allow PayPal to assess "supplemental information to more fully understand the strength of a business."
Esch noted that the acquisition "will enable us to better serve small businesses by enhancing our underwriting capabilities to provide access to affordable business financing solutions to more businesses to help them grow and thrive."
Founded in 1998, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market in 2002 and turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay Inc. in 2015, PayPal operates a payment system that supports online money transfers and serves as an alternative to paper transaction methods like checks and money orders.
On his part, Ed Harycki, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Swift Financial, boasted in a statement that the online lender's credit performance metrics as the "best in the industry" and that by joining forces, "we'll accelerate our efforts to provide expedient access to working capital that keeps America's small businesses moving forward."
Neither PayPal nor Swift Financial disclosed terms of the deal.
