PayPal Holdings Inc. shares PYPL, +3.73% are up 4% in afternoon trading Monday after a report highlighted the company’s hire of an executive to lead its consumer-investing efforts. The CNBC report pointed to the LinkedIn profile of Rich Hagen, a former Ally Invest president who now lists himself as the chief executive of “Invest at PayPal” responsible for “[l]eading PayPal’s efforts to explore opportunities in the consumer investment business.” PayPal already lets users buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies, but it doesn’t yet offer stock trading. The company is looking to boost its feature set on the core PayPal and Venmo platforms as it strives to become a “super-app” that brings together diverse financial functions. A PayPal spokesperson directed MarketWatch to comments that Chief Executive Dan Schulman made during the company’s February investor day, when he talked about opportunities to leverage partnerships and add more financial services to the PayPal platform. He spoke of bolstering PayPal’s “investment capabilities because if somebody’s going to be putting their money onto our platform, we want them to be able to grow that money, to invest that money in not just things like crypto but in individual stocks and other assets that we can digitize and allow people to invest in.” The CNBC report referenced an unnamed source who said the stock-trading features were unlikely to launch this year. Rival Square Inc. SQ, +1.37% already offers stock-trading functions on its Cash App. Shares of PayPal have risen 11.2% over the past three months as the S&P 500 SPX, +0.51% has risen 7.9%.
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