Payment facilitator PayPal is looking into buying Pinterest.
As reported at Reuters, the deal estimated at $45 billion would allow PayPal to get further into that interplay of social media and e-commerce where online shoppers might shop on visual sites like Pinterest and Instagram prior to purchasing.
Reuters notes that such a deal would dwarf Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016. Specifically, PayPal’s deal would nearly double the amount of $26 billion paid for LinkedIn at the time.
“PayPal has offered $70 (roughly Rs. 5,200) per share, mostly in stock, for Pinterest, one of the sources said,” writes the unnamed author. “The online payments provider hopes to successfully negotiate and announce a deal by the time it reports quarterly earnings on November 8, the source added.”
This news comes as PayPal continues to build its operational footprint in a time when finance and money are changing rapidly.
One of PayPal’s recent successes is in integrating its payment system into all sorts of third-party merchants, from WordPress e-commerce sites to much larger and more sophisticated shopping carts. The choice to either integrate PayPal controls or move shoppers into PayPal directly to buy further allows PayPal’s reach to extend itself over time.
The other prong of PayPal’s plan that sticks out as a successful pivot is the move toward cryptocurrency.
Some of the smartest companies are scrambling to integrate Bitcoin into their operational models. True to form, PayPal has gotten in on the ground floor, offering users the ability to buy Bitcoin in their digital platform.
As stocks reacted to the news, PayPal sunk 4.9% while Pinterest rose over 12%.
“(The) combination would be a significant positive for PayPal’s ongoing monetization initiatives on both sides of its merchant and consumer platforms, especially if Pinterest’s social commerce platform gets integrated with Honey’s AI into PayPal’s destination app,” Wedbush analysts wrote as quoted in the Reuters coverage.