PayPal, a U.S.-based online payment service provider, recently announced its partnership with Chinese bank card issuer UnionPay alongside its PayPal China Connect service, according to a report from Tencent’s tech news site.
This recent venture links Chinese consumers directly to the firm's international merchants, hence making inter-country transactions more effective and easier.
Such transactions comprise a significant portion of the service provider's platform, taking up about a quarter of its total transactions. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman added that around 79 percent of its consumers hail from the U.S., the U.K., Brazil and Germany.
In China, cross-border transactions have increased 16-fold since last year's Nov. 11 "Singles Day" annual online shopping promotion.
Currently, PayPal has approximately 165 million active users globally. Its net total payment volume last year reached $228 billion, marking a 27-percent year-on-year growth.
The report also showed that a third of its transactions in whole were made via mobile gadgets. In five years' time, mobile transactions have grown from less than 1 percent to 30 percent.
PayPal, with 18 years of existence, is a subsidiary of eBay and is slated to spin off from the e-commerce firm sometime in late 2015. After the split, Schulman will take in charge of the independent company.
Schulman noted that the firm will then be providing full suite of services and products for both its merchants and consumers.
"We want to be payment agnostic to a merchant. If a merchant wants us to do 100% of their checkout, not only can they integrate the PayPal button, but we'll integrate Apple Pay, Android Pay, other forms of payment into that, because we are an open platform," Schulman enthused.