PayPal Announces Acquisition of Honey Science Corporation

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by Anna Lee · 3 min read
PayPal Announces Acquisition of Honey Science Corporation
Photo: Honey

PayPal has announced that they reached an agreement for acquiring Honey, the money-saving browser extension and app.

PayPal has had a rather interesting and eventful 2019. One of the latest moves is the recent announcement that they will be acquiring the Honey Science Corporation which is the developer of the popular mobile app and browser extension for $4 billion, most of which will be in cash.

Among other recent updates, we should mention that PayPal joined and then exited the hotly-discussed Libra Association, which is the governing body for Facebook‘s upcoming Libra token and Calibra wallet and recently, their CEO stated that the company is developing some blockchain-related projects but noted that they are not in direct competition with Libra. Regardless, the payment processor continues to find itself at the forefront of the financial world thanks to the millions of users and its every move is being watched and reported on. 

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The new acquisition is PayPal’s largest to date and will see them expanding on their business model in a significant way. Previously, PayPal had been competing with platforms such as Apple Pay and traditional credit and debit cards and most of the focus was on the payment section of the customer journey. Now, they will be part of the deal discovery process and will have a hand in customers making purchasing decisions.

As of now, Honey has 17 million global users and they make use of Honey’s various money-saving tools in order to get price alerts on various products, create shopping lists, track prices and so on. Most of these users also tend to be young millennials who are freshly in the workforce or in the middle of their careers and this is a new market for PayPal.

“What’s exciting is that we can take the functionality Honey now offers — which is product discovery, price tracking, offers and loyalty — and build that into the PayPal and Venmo experiences,” said PayPal SVP of Global Consumer Products and Technology, John Kunze. “When Honey says they’re putting money in the pockets of their customers — that’s perfectly in line with what we want to do. We want to make digital commerce and financial services more affordable, easier to use, more fun and more accessible to people around the world.” 

When Honey was founded in 2012, it was originally only a browser extension. Honey works by comparing prices across various merchants from fashion to technology and even food and shows customers that cheapest possible deals as well as giving them discount codes that function on the various platforms. Honey recently announced that its customers have saved up to $800 million combined by making use of its service and it is possible that certain PayPal functionalities will be implemented onto honey to make it easier for customers to make use of both services.

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