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volume 7 • fall 2014
Patrick gauthier
General Manager, Emerging Retail Services, PayPal
“Athing of beauty is a joy forever,” says Patrick Gauthier, quoting poet John Keats. “I believe great innovations are invariably elegant and beautiful in their simplicity. Payments over the years have become inherently complicated,” he adds, “which is why so much opportunity for innovation still lies ahead.”
Gauthier was born in France and moved to the U.S. when he was five. An admitted child “geek” who was coding simple computer games by the age of nine,
he eventually received an engineering degree. After his schooling, he was designing semiconductor chips for
Schlumberger, now Gemalto, before being chosen to work in the company’s smart card business in 1994, and he’s been working in the payments industry ever since.
For the past two years Gauthier has managed PayPal’s emerging retail services business unit, where he and his team work on solutions for person-
alized offers. The level of personalization to in-store and mobile offers is the key to success. “When we connect consumers with merchants they care about, in a style that aligns with their preferences and at the right time, there is real opportunity to create surprise and delight,” he says.
Whether it’s paying for merchandise online or at a brick-and-mortar store POS using a mobile phone, PayPal endeavors to remove consumers’ pain points when shopping and paying, Gauthier says. PayPal makes consumers’ lives simpler by connecting them to all their funding sources, including banks (credit and debit cards), merchants (gift and loyalty cards) and advertisers (promotions and offers).
Envisioning the Future
Gauthier realized the effect mobile devices would have on commerce over a decade ago. His epiphany came while working on a project in South Korea with mobile service provider SK Telecom and phone manu- facturer Samsung.
“My aha moment was when I realized Koreans bought new phones more than once a year without subsidy because of the pace new functions were introduced and the status of having the newest mobile phone conferred,” he says. “Then I knew phones were no longer for making calls. They had become portable terminals and very personal objects.”
Gauthier says the world has yet to see the full potential of mobile, and the industry is on the edge of many key changes. This includes “the proliferation of proximity technologies—from assisted GPS to Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology—which will create better, faster and more secure shopping and payment experi- ences that are location and context relevant.” PayPal launched its BLE-powered Beacon last year.
Gauthier also is enthusiastic about “wearables,” such as watches and eyeglasses, being part of m-commerce’s future. “Devices are getting smaller, always connected and ubiquitous,” he says. “At PayPal, we see wearables as a huge opportunity to create seamless, context- driven payment experiences that truly change the
way people buy and sell goods.”
As Gauthier continues to seek out elegant innovation, he does so with a credo that’s driven him throughout his career: “You win as a team; you lose as an individ- ual. My greatest accomplishments were as part of a high-performing team.”
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