PayPal is bidding for social shopping platform Pinterest

PayPal, a company that focuses on digital payments and e-commerce, is reportedly in talks to acquire social media and shopping platform Pinterest for $45B.

Why should we care?
The marriage of PayPal and Pinterest helps PayPal enhance the breadth of its financial services offerings, which includes money-management tools, digital payments, crypto, credit, e-commerce services, and more. With the addition of a social shopping tool like Pinterest – which has “shoppable pins” that allow users to easily purchase items on Pinterest’s curated galleries – is a step along a trajectory for PayPal to become a “superapp” along the lines of Alipay or WeChat. Pinterest, which monetizes its services through tailored ads, pitches itself as an engine to help brands understand consumer purchase intent. With shopping data from Pinterest, PayPal would be able to enrich its customer acquisition and retention tools, and carry out targeted marketing campaigns. A tie-up with PayPal also gives Pinterest more runway to grow: Pinterest claimed to have more than 450 million monthly active users in the second quarter, but it reportedly “hasn’t been able to monetize many of them.” There are some doubts that the deal will come together, but if successful, it would be PayPal’s biggest acquisition yet.