Scott Thompson becoming CEO of Yahoo! today means at least one thing: the provider of an online smorgasbord of services will step up its payments activities.

Thompson comes to Yahoo! from eBay’s PayPal, where he built PayPal into a payments juggernaut. According to Yahoo!, PayPal “under Thompson’s leadership”:

PayPal solidified its lead as the global online payment service, expanding its user base from 50 million to more than 104 million active users in 190 countries worldwide, increasing the number of merchant partners to more than 8 million globally, and growing revenues from $1.8 billion to $4+ billion in 2011.

Yahoo! has 700 million users (although I’m not sure how Yahoo! defines a “user”), which offers Thompson more than ample audience with which to play the payments game. Officially, Thompson says he “will attack both the opportunity ahead and the competitive challenges with an appropriate balance of urgency and thoughtfulness.” I expect that to include trying to swipe at PayPal’s marketshare.

Of course, in 2004 PayPal officially whipped Yahoo in payments when it forced Yahoo to shutter its PayDirect service. I presume Yahoo still maintains the PayDirect technology — somewhere. And that is really the part of the problem with Yahoo: it is so vast and sprawling that it is difficult to find its services. For example, I can’t tell what payments systems or services Yahoo currently offers, even as I suspect that it is more robust than presumed. 

Where Thompson’s departure leaves PayPal is another matter entirely, and one that we will deal with in a separate post. Suffice it to say, Yahoo! hired a proven leader, and one who is more than well-versed in making payments a waterfall of profits.