PayPal was born because online transactions were considered too risky for the banks to handle. Fifteen years and gazillions of dollars later, PayPal is sitting pretty on a user base of 125 million and growing. The eBay subsidiary processed $4 billion in mobile payments in 2011 and predicted it would double that the following year. Wrong. It more than tripled the total, bringing in a whopping $14 billion — and this is just 10% of PayPal’s total payment volume. As the payments space gets more and more crowded, PayPal remains the elder statesman. In 2012 the payments giant introduced PayPal Access, a tool to make web shopping faster and safer, PayPal Here, a dongle and platform for accepting credit cards, and partnered with Discover to appear at a point of sale near you. We wonder what PayPal will do over the next 15 years.

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