From “add on” to being the platform. Via Finextra paypal’s CEO Schulman:
“Our vision for PayPal is to be the world’s leading open digital payments platform. What that means is that we want to enable consumers and merchants to come together in the emerging world of digital commerce. We want to allow the ecosystem to build on top of our platform capabilities, any technology they wish, any payment form that they wish, reward, offers, loyalty, all of that on top of our platform,”
PayPal is trying to move up the network value chain. Old linear conceptions of value chains are going extinct. But in the network your position(s) are relative depending on the position of the spectator. Let’s call this the network relativity theory.
This also applies to payments. Integration of payments in networked value chains is difficult enough but expanding to be a general e-commerce platform is an other.
Good luck PayPal.