PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like cheques and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites, and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee in exchange for benefits such as one-click transactions and password memory. PayPal's payment system, also called PayPal, is considered a type of payment rail.
Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal had its initial public offering in 2002, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year.In 2014, eBay announced plans to spin off PayPal into an independent company by mid-2015 and this was completed on July 18, 2015.