PayPal hires country manager for India

Online payment provider PayPal, which slowly phased out some of its services in India over the last few years, has appointed Vikram Narayan as the Country Manager of its India operations, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Narayan was earlier the CEO of Experian Services India Limited. When contacted, the company confirmed the development.

“Appointed 3 months ago, Vikram’s focus will be on educating Indian merchants on growth opportunities in the global e-commerce marketplace, developing partnerships to bring the right portfolio of customers to the network, and working with the global and regional teams to deliver great localized product experiences for customers,” the company said.

The company has also started cranking out analytics solutions from its development centres in Bangalore and Chennai.

The eBay subsidiary is creating Big Data platforms that can be used to prevent fraud and detect anomalies such as inconsistent and unrealistic transactions. This will be used to further its core payment product.

According to Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, PayPal India Development Centers, there are 250 employees working on data and analytics here .As part of this thrust, PayPal has also partnered with IIT Madras to sponsor PhD students to work on specific research projects that focus on Big Data.

eBay hires 100 graduates

Meanwhile, online marketplace eBay announced on Monday that it had hired around 100 graduates, with the majority of the recruits headed to work at the Paypal India development centres.

“I’m proud to say that we started hiring freshers back in 2011 and have hired 80-100 graduates every year over the last three years. Much of the university hiring programme that we do here, which includes an induction programme called ‘Upload’, has been adopted by the rest of our company globally,” Mr. Pahuja said.

“I believe it is not about creating a factory of workers. We offer these freshers packages of Rs. 11-14 lakh. We want to create craftsmen who craft code. The boot-camp we put our freshers through also brings a lot of productivity benefits as well,” he added.