PayPal is sticking a pin in Pinterest, the social media platform of scrapbookers and mood board enthusiasts. The US digital payments giant has offered to buy it for about $45bn.
The price may be high, but the duo sit well together. PayPal has been talking up “superapp” plans for months, readying investors for the segue. Like China’s WeChat and Alipay in Asia, PayPal wants to create an ecosystem that bundles financial services with social media and commerce. Hence recent acquisitions such as online coupon start-up Honey Science, bought for $4bn in 2019, and this year’s $2.7bn purchase of Japanese buy-now-pay-later group Paidy.
The missing piece was a social network that would serve as a gateway to consumers. Pinterest offers this in spades. The app has about 450m monthly active users, mostly women. They come looking for images of things they are interested in or might want to buy. This makes Pinterest valuable real estate in the fight to secure access to the “purchasing funnel”.