Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

Again, my name is Brian Johnson and I do serve as the Senior Director of Information Security at PayPal. I appreciate your giving us the opportunity to speak with you today and for making the time in your busy schedule.

I suspect you all know a bit about PayPal generally speaking, but allow me to add a bit of detail.

Founded in 1998, PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of more than 277 million consumers and merchants in more than 200 markets worldwide. We offer online and mobile merchant acquiring and money transfer services. PayPal is the most popular digital wallet in Canada.

We are based in San Jose, California, and our Canadian headquarters is in Toronto with offices in Vancouver. PayPal Canada was incorporated in 2006. We have more that 7.1 million customers including more than 250,000 small business customers in Canada.

Fuelled by a fundamental belief that having access to financial services creates opportunity, PayPal is committed to democratizing financial services and empowering people and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. Our open digital payments platform gives PayPal's 277 million active account holders the confidence to connect and transact in new and powerful ways, whether they are online or on a mobile device. Through a combination of technological innovation and strategic partnerships, PayPal creates better ways to manage and move money, and offers choice and flexibility when sending payments, paying or getting paid.

We believe now is the time to reimagine money and to democratize financial services so that managing and moving money is a right for all citizens, not just the affluent. We believe that every person has a right to participate fully in the global economy. We have an obligation to empower people to exercise this right and improve their financial health. As a fintech pioneer and an established leader, we believe in providing simple, affordable, secure and reliable financial services and digital payments that enable the hopes, dreams and ambitions of millions of people around the world. We have a fundamental commitment to put our customers at the centre of everything we do.

Securing our customers and their data is central to our mission. For financial companies, data security is the main pillar. Through strong partnerships, strategic investments and a tireless commitment to protecting consumers, PayPal has resolved to be an industry leader in cybersecurity capabilities and to help make the Internet safer.

We have in our favour more than 20 years of experience in processing electronic transactions safely. PayPal has one of the most sophisticated fraud prevention engines in the world, which gets smarter with every transaction that goes through our system. With our advanced fraud monitoring technology, we detect and prevent attacks before they happen.

Security is in our DNA, and it's at the epicentre of all that we do at PayPal. We are the number one trusted brand of e-commerce and mobile commerce around the world. People trust PayPal because they know that we don't share customers' financial information with merchants, retailers or online sellers. Our robust security standards ensure that every part of a transaction is safe and secure.

At PayPal we believe we have a responsibility to help protect our users against harm. Privacy has always been one of our main concerns. Our customers trust us with their data. We take that trust very seriously. We collect only the data that's necessary to fulfill services that a customer requests, to improve product experiences and deliver relevant PayPal advertisements and to prevent fraud. We never sell or rent customer information.

It's commonly held among global law enforcement agencies that cybercrime and online methods of fraud are now more common than crimes committed in the offline and physical world. As the committee is certainly aware, over the last five years, the RCMP alone has observed an almost 50% increase in cybercrime reports from Canadians. I applaud the committee for aggressive action and for its support of Canada's national security strategy, by including significant funding for investments in cybersecurity as part of your commitment to safety and security. Building an innovative and adaptive cyber-ecosystem is a crucial step to being able to quickly scale and combat emerging threats to critical infrastructure, government, business and individuals' digital information.

To conclude, I would like to emphasize PayPal's commitment to cybersecurity and our willingness to work together with the Canadian government and industry.

Thank you again for the invitation to discuss these very relevant topics and to represent PayPay's strong position in support of consumer data protection and privacy.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Transcript

Discussions (0)