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smokedroaches t1_j6og2au wrote

How does Paypal even have 28,000 employees in the first place? What do they all do? That seems like an outrageous number for a company with no physical product or meaningful customer service.

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optimaloutcome t1_j6oitjm wrote

They're a global company. They have software developers, legal, real estate, infrastructure, customer service, etc. 28000 doesn't seem crazy to me.

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smokedroaches t1_j6oknmo wrote

I guess, it still just seems outrageous for how little they actually provide. They certainly don't provide meaningful customer service to individual users.

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thetasigma_1355 t1_j6osd5s wrote

As an international company doing financial transactions you typically need expertise in every single country you operate in as you need to be compliant with the laws and regulations in every single country you operate in. You can get in to a ton of problems if you don’t have effective AML and KYC compliance programs.

Some countries (China) often require on-soil infrastructure as well.

It’s really hard to appreciate the complexity of international business until you’ve had to deal with it. Customer service is a tiny segment of their business. Mountains of lawyers and compliance professionals are what drive the employee count.

They also certainly have numerous product teams developing different tools for different types of customers. Things like Open Banking are becoming much larger and more prevalent.

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ToxicAdamm t1_j6oxr1p wrote

> Mountains of lawyers and compliance professionals are what drive the employee count.

You would think you could just contract that out, but maybe there are government rules against that type of thing.

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thetasigma_1355 t1_j6ozxig wrote

Contracting out a mountain of lawyers is a terrible value proposition. They charge hundreds an hour and you need hundreds of them at 40-50 hours a week year round. Much cheaper (and effective) to have your own legal dept.

Compliance can be a mixed bag but generally it’s much cheaper to create your own programs. And as you said, certain compliance functions will be required to be in-house. Depending on the industry, you also have to consider the types of data you’ll be exchanging. Financial data is highly sensitive so you can’t just offshore resources in Vietnam or somewhere else in SE Asia.

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kingofducks t1_j6ozpwe wrote

You know how much legal fees cost? Hiring full time employees is to save money.

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joe-biden-updates t1_j6p0ilh wrote

“If you do everything right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”

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flip314 t1_j6p2bzq wrote

Letting everything go wrong often has the same effect though

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ChocolateTsar t1_j6on3sd wrote

PayPal has a number of businesses/subsidiaries that aren't household names such as Venmo or PayPal.

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barrinmw t1_j6ogje8 wrote

A lot of investigators for fraud and anti-terrorism/anti-organized crime activities?

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pegothejerk t1_j6ohnd2 wrote

I just assume it takes that many people to figure out how each reported case will best make profits for PayPal, regardless of the guilt or illegality of the person being accused or doing the reporting.

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PrittedPunes t1_j6ovywv wrote

I'm more puzzled how services like Uber and GrubHub seem to have thousands and thousands of (corporate) employees.

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FifteenthPen t1_j6oq70a wrote

> What do they all do?

Someone has to freeze accounts collecting money for charity until the time the money was needed most has passed!

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WritingTheRongs t1_j6pjjck wrote

Yeah it's hard to picture these big multinational companies with the tens of thousands of employees. In my naive brain, Paypal just runs on a bunch of virtual servers without intervention. Some of their processes require duplication in each country I'm guessing. Duplicate IT teams, devs, customer service, etc. Then you accrete employees. HR, secretaries, office staff, janitorial? idk i still can't picture 28k people

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