How PayPal’s Data & Customer-First Approach Drives Success | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

Two, three.

Remember the days when you walked around with actual cash in your wallet because cash was king and many of us were reluctant to make purchases online? Yeah, I don't remember those days either. Those days have long gone and the word PayPal is now synonymous with online purchases. I know firsthand too much. So after being at home the majority of this year and making all of my purchases online every day, I'm getting a box. What we Learned today is PayPal, and many of you probably didn't know this, offers other services that have been critical during this pandemic, such as touchless payments and extending credits to small businesses, which has been essential. Good morning, I'm Leah McGowan Hare, and welcome to another one of our live weekly conversations as part of our Leading Through Change series. Here we're giving you a chance to hear from leaders who are doing their best to support themselves through this critical times as well as their communities. We give so much information and I hope that you guys are all taking notes. Now before I hand it over to our amazing host and wonderful friend of mine, Mulesoft's CMO Lindsey Irvine, I want to preview the next hour. Now, Lindsay will be interviewing PayPal's Dan Tarunan about how his focus on integrated approach helps them better connect with their customers. Now, Dan is PayPal's Vice President of employee technology and and experiences and data centers and can fill us in how they at PayPal have used data first, customer first approach to drive their success. After that, we'll then dive into an amazing demo highlighting the power of of mulesoft anypoint platform. And after that, we will close and you want to be ready for this, an amazing performance by an amazing group called Flor de Tolo Ace. I've been practicing that all day. Tolo Ache. And as we do every week here on Leading Through Change, we want to help those who need it the most because we're all about how can we get through this pandemic together. Now, this year we are commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disability act to celebrate progress towards ensuring equal access for all. Salesforce and the Muscular Dystrophy association, now they're teaming up to show strength for mda. Now we want you to be part of this movement as well. So join the movement and wellness campaign. And listen later to this episode to MDA's CEO Lynn O' Connor Voss, who is bringing back get ready for this, the famous MDA telethon on October 24th. So mark your calendars now. It's totally reimagined for the digital age. And get ready to clutch your pearls featuring Kevin Hart and friends. So you get ready to laugh. Well, because laughing is also very good for you. So to get involved, please visit the link you see on your screen now and help us support this year's NDA's telethon. Now with that, it is my pleasure to welcome our Host for today, Ms. Lindsey Irvine.

Thanks, Leah. Great to be here. For those that have tuned in to leading through change before, you know, this is about coming together, learning from each other, and figuring out how we lead through change stronger. We certainly have had to deal with a lot of change in the midst of crisis and a quick virtual show of hands. How many have had to pivot a product, a strategy or service? Okay, now another show of hands. How many had total copious amounts of time to go do it? Obviously none of us, right, like we've had to pivot, we've had to change how we deliver, we've had to change how we build and we've had to move incredibly fast and at the end of the day, deliver a delightful connected experiences to our customers, to our employees and partners. And at the center of making that possible is data. How do you deliver and accelerate the value for your customers, for your products or services, using data at the heart of your strategy and through all the people we've talked to, I mean, data integration, how do you really unlock that gold within your company? Is top of mind. So three things that really are themes that have come out through those conversations. One, do you have a strategy that lets you integrate your data, unlock it across all your systems? Two, do you have a strategy that helps you do that in a way that lets you go faster, not slower, be more efficient, not less? And three, do you have an approach to that integration and data that actually at the end of the day helps you deliver a 360 degree view of your customers or more connected experiences? Because that's the holy grail. That's what it's all about. To learn more, I am joined by an amazing guest, an amazing trailblazer of ours, Dan Turian, who is joining us from PayPal. He's Vice President of Employee Technology Experiences and Data Centers and we are so excited to have him. Dan, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much, Lindsey, for having me. I'm excited to spend this time with you all.

Awesome. All right, well, I guess let's start with how are you? Where are you? We're all at home these days, so give us a little bit about how things are going for you.

You know, on a personal level, I'm doing fine. I have it fairly easy. I live in San Carlos, so I'm halfway between San Francisco in San Jose. As most companies, we've been in this work from home construct since March of this year. Maybe if you would indulge me, Lindsey, I could share with this audience maybe a brief story before we get into the Q and A. Yeah, let's do it.

That'd be great.

We've got approximately 60 offices around the world, and in my role, I have techs in almost every single office providing traditional desktop support and engineering. I recall getting the call in February when we acknowledged that there clearly was a virus occurring in China. We were going to have to close our Shanghai office. My response and thoughts were really about the Shanghai office and our employees that operate from that office. Didn't really think too much about this becoming a pandemic, and I found myself driving to work. I think it was the first Friday in March and got a call from our APAC EMEA leader who said, I just want to let you know it looks like a decision's been made to close the Berlin office because we've had an exposure there as well. Again, kind of struck me odd. China, Berlin. Clearly there's a lot of geography between those two locations. But again, wasn't necessarily thinking of, we're about to walk into a crisis and all that would come with it. As the day progressed, our chief risk officer reached out and said, dan, I just want you to know that there's been a core group of us huddling on this topic for quite some time. We think it's bigger than what we may be hearing on the news, and you need to be prepared to ensure that all of our employees and our partners can exit our offices. Probably best case in the next couple weeks. And of course, my initial reaction was like, you're kidding, right? It's like, no, Dan, this is big. And you'll need to develop a plan to get all of our employees home safely as quickly as possible. I remember bringing together my team, and for the first time, I think, in my entire career, I started to hear my voice crack as I began to explain to them what I was just sharing and what was going to be required of them. This is from someone who has led through the separation from ebay, led through the 1989 earthquake. Sorry to kind of date myself, so it was not my first rodeo. But as I was speaking to my team, the business gravity and the human gravity really began to sink in with me. And like in any crisis mode, we went into our daily standups and we had one for different time zones and different employee basis and things of that nature. As best you can, you try to keep these things very structured. And our business continuity partners and our risk partners were plugged in. And everybody's trying to follow some fashion of a playbook game plan. And I learned very early on that you just had to put the responsibility on the leaders on the ground and let them make point in time decisions. And that turned out to be much, much more effective than following, I hate to say this, any kind of BCP plan or a game plan, because there truly was no game plan. You know, for the first time, at least in my vocabulary, the words pandemic and unprecedented became almost kind of daily words that you found yourself using. So I would definitely urge there's time to lead from the center, but there's also time to put the responsibility on those that are on the ground and that have the relationships with their business partners and are seeing things real time. And that helped us respond much more effectively than I think if we tried to hold everything at the mothership in San Jose.

Really thanks for sharing and certainly resonates. I mean much of what you said, one element, just the human side of this and having to really go there with the teams, this is something you can't just put to the side and continue business as usual. But really acknowledging I want to go to the team part next, but before I do, maybe could you just take a moment explain to people your role? What do you do for PayPal?

I lead employee technologies and experiences. It is essentially all of our corporate platforms that operate the company on a day in, day out basis. Our finance platform, HR platform, selling platform, marketing platform, etc. Things of that nature, as well as all of the tools and devices that we expose to our employees to enable them to get their jobs done and to be productive and to stay connected to the PayPal ecosystem.

That's awesome. I'm going to go back with that in mind. Let's go back to the team part because you mentioned something important, which is how do we really activate our team and the people that are closest to our customers to innovate and to guide through this time? How have you had to rethink or reshape your team structure, how your team leads and operates to meet your customers where they are right now?

Yeah, well, I guess you could say that we've been fairly lucky from an employee enablement perspective. We have 98.5% of our global workforce now working from home, and most productivity measures are trending relatively positive. But that said, there is more to be done from an employee lens as well as thinking about how we operate the company in this new virtual norm. It's important to note that employee wellness during this difficult period is very important to us. Our response to date has included a wellness leave program, wellness days, thinking about how we optimize meetings so that recognizing that our employees are balancing being a parent, being a teacher, so many different hats that they're all trying to wear at the same time. Also in this new construct, how do we start to build and foster culture and community? All of those are factoring into how we think about this from an employee perspective. And then of course, there's the customer aspect of this as well. And as you may know Lindsey, we've seen tremendous adoption of our platform over this period, which gives us confidence that we have the right products to help our customers navigate this pandemic. I'll highlight the work that we're doing as a company to make available touchless payments, extending credits to small business, enabling cross border money transfers so that families can help their family members in other countries, and ultimately also ensuring that our platform is secure, available and that we're responsive to our customers as we see this significant growth on the platform now.

Well, I'd like to believe that was all well and best laid plans in January. My guess is you've had to kind of pivot and do some of your own adjustments as Covid happened and as your customers started having new needs. How did you some of those really great customer focused initiatives that you just mentioned, how did the past six months either accelerate those initiatives? Were some of them net new? And how did you really structure your team to move quickly to address those new customer needs?

I think the pandemic changed everything for us. Arguably what we've done and seen as adoption of the platform over the last several months may have taken years for that to happen without the pandemic. So definitely the pandemic has helped accelerate how we both think about servicing our customer externally, but also how we think about our digital transformation journey and being able to ensure that both our external facing platforms and our internal facing platforms and capabilities are well positioned to support PayPal's growth and the growing appetite on customers for our platform. In context of your question of organizing the team, I wouldn't say that necessarily we've reorganized, but I think we've taken a deeper appreciation at least for my organization on building and maintaining those relationships on the ground and not looking for leadership hierarchy to intersect into those relationships and to influence those relationships. Like I said, let the leaders on the ground make the decisions that are best for them. And what makes sense in Dublin may not make sense in Chennai, India. What makes sense in Omaha may not make sense in our New York office. So starting to recognize that every office has a different Persona. There are different individuals, different skill sets that work out of that office. And how do we start to cater and tailor our offerings and our response to what's required in that location? 1 and 2 I would say although the response is different, the experience of what the employee wants to do hasn't really changed dramatically. At its essence, employees want to do, they want to get their job done, they want to know what's going on with the company, what's going on with their organization, what's going on with their team, they want to learn, they want to continue to advance in their career, build new skill sets, and ultimately they want a community. So I think how we delivered those experiences pre Covid and how we now start thinking about delivering those experiences post Covid, that changed and is continuing to evolve and change. But it is very essence what the what an employee needs to be able to feel secure, successful and well taken care of. I think that ultimately those needs don't change. It's the delivery of that experience that changes.

That's really great. You mentioned a word, digital transformation. And I think that can mean so many different things to different organizations. And yet I know for executives across industry, this notion of an accelerated digital imperative is very top of mind. Can you share what does digital transformation look like within PayPal? Because I think for so many of us we think of PayPal as such a leader of digital. So what is that digital transformation journey and success look like to you guys?

Sure, you know the case for change in context of digital transformation for us I think is very clear. We are a global fintech that operates in 200 countries, 100 currencies and we now have approximately 346 million consumers on the platform. So as we mentioned, both our external and internal facing systems must be able to enable this growth, scale and reach. And maybe very apropos for this discussion, a prime example is our sales transformation in which sales cloud plays a mission critical role. With the deployment of sales cloud we are now able to fully digitize the end to end process sales cycle inclusive of pricing, underwriting, legal and all the traditional selling activities which then allows us to shorten that sales cycle, recognize revenue sooner in the process and deliver a much better experience to the merchant that we are onboarding at that point in time. In addition, this has also positioned us to apply AI to improve our lead to win ratio that as our sales team interact with their various merchant prospects, they're working with a high level of confidence. They're not thinking about the various systems that they need to navigate so that they're not mechanics but they're really artists in the selling process. We're also taking those same learnings from AI and informing our merchant service decisioning process so that we can reduce churn with our merchants and improve sentiment. It's important to note that building on this momentum, we are beginning to start similar transformations in the customer service and marketing verticals which will enable us to tie together the entire customer journey.

So is that the end state for you? Just to put a fine point as for those listening in, is it that connected set of customer journeys across the various touch points that leads you to that place of transformation?

Yes, I think I look at our landscape from the lens of three spaces. There's natural affinity between the marketing cycle, the selling cycle and the servicing cycle. And how do we bring all that together from a customer journey perspective? There's a natural affinity in the finance space of how do we think about where our debit and credit meet? What does that mean to us from a settlement reconciliation perspective? What does that mean to us from a geo expansion perspective? Then ultimately, how do we modernize how we think about tax, treasury and traditional finance functions? That's a second area of digital transformation that we are beginning to explore. And and then the third is maybe more standard corporate functions like hr, legal, corporate communications. I think all three of those spaces are ripe for transformation. But clearly and for good reason, we are starting in the sales, service and marketing space initially because we think that that is going to have the greatest impact on our business and ultimately the greatest impact on our customers.

And you talk about these key initiatives for your business. Can you share more about how you see data as a lever of foundation, of driving those outcomes and accelerating your strategy?

Of course. Data is the fuel that powers PayPal. From mitigating risk and accelerating innovation to delivering on the ultimate goal of any business, which is giving its customers what they want. Data is truly a force. That force can either be a burden or something that truly liberates you, your business and the things that you do. Data, when tamed, can be an asset like nothing else. Taming data has provided the answer to a central question. Underlying our business specifically is how do you balance competing demands for secure transaction, but also deliver a frictionless customer experience. Our customer satisfaction hinges on our ability to provide both convenience and security in everything we do. That balancing act is made possible by a deep understanding of the customer's usage of our platform. And to put that in context, PayPal processes approximately 27 million transactions a day, collecting important information about our customer, spending patterns, behavior, location and more that we use to help keep those transactions secure. For example, this data is used to verify our customer's identity implicitly so they don't need to identify themselves explicitly every time they want to transact, providing them with the security they need to have peace of mind and shaving off valuable time off that transaction lifecycle or when they are making that purchase. Data allows us to close the loop between speed and safety. Within a two second transaction, we will conduct hundreds if not thousands of risk checks to ensure that the transaction is a valid transaction. Data also enables us to provide, test, improve and promote and personalize our service. It helps us improve our innovations, including enhancing fraud protection, being able to offer buyer and seller protection for qualified purchases, and maybe just to illustrate that with an example, our platform will process your rideshare purchase in San Francisco because we know you used Venmo to send money to your brother from the LaGuardia terminal six hours ago. And that's the power of what data can do and it does do for our business.

I mean that's incredible and clearly a topic you have energy around and could keep sharing examples with. Two things that struck me on that one, I love the notion of taming data. I heard a lot of people talk about as an orchestra as well. How do you conduct the data across all the different systems and apps? And then 27 million transactions, I mean that's huge the scale and scope of that for the audience. I think all too often given the criticality of data at your scale or even at a smaller scale, the topic of integration comes up, right? Getting at that data is actually really hard. And the reality is data lives in a lot of different systems, apps, devices.

Today.

There's often the case to say, okay, how do we just get at that data integration as necessary but not necessarily strategic. How do you within PayPal view integration as a strategic pillar to your digital agenda? And how have you approached it?

Let me provide some context for that. When PayPal first began to formalize and mature our API integration strategy with our merchant and developer partners, there really at that time was no vendor solutions that really met our API management requirements. As most other companies in the space, we naturally built our own internal solutions for API publishing and discovery capabilities, but while also keeping an eye on what marketplace was doing and what trends were occurring in the API management space. As PayPal's API portfolio rapidly grew and new protocols and patterns for API integrations emerged, we found that mulesoft's offering approach best matched our vision and objectives. Democratizing payments and digital transformation, ride the rails of APIs, and leveraging MuleSoft is a key to accelerating those modernization efforts. Now, Lindsey, as we may have touched on while we are still in the early days, we are already beginning to see the benefit of the alignment between mulesoft and Salesforce with the API Community Manager Solution. Combining the MuleSoft API strategy with the power of the Salesforce platform will enable an unparalleled user experience for API publishing and discovery. There is still untapped potential in this alignment, and we look forward to the benefits of the seamless offerings still to come.

That's great to hear. Can you share more this notion of API led integration? Creating integrations that you can then reuse both internally as you just shared share externally through products like Mulesoft's API Community Manager? How does this notion of reuse of integrations actually help you go faster, be more efficient, and get at those strategic outcomes you shared earlier?

I'll speak essentially from my lens. You can imagine a company the size of PayPal that continues to grow and evolve. We're moving a lot of data back and forth between our various systems of record. Each of that can't be a separate railroad by itself. To the extent that we start to create a shared railroad where that data is published, it's secure, it's curated in a way that makes it much more effective. Now we're not thinking about data movement. Now we're starting to think about how do we gain better insights and learnings from that data? How do we provide those insights and learnings to our next generation of products, to our next generation of customer service, and ultimately also to our next generation of employee enablement. So again, you want to take the mechanical aspect out of data movement and allow people to look at that data, understand that data, and ultimately make the right call for the customer.

I love that I'm going to use that analogy that we think of as paving roads. But the shared shared railways. How have those shared railways help you do what so many are looking to do today, which is anticipate the future, right? Anticipate the inevitable set of next changes that are going to come their way? How is this kind of data led reusability Approach API led shared railways help you drive that future innovation for your customers and for your company.

I think the most, if I could just tie it back maybe to the retail space. I think the most significant trend in retail world brought on by the pandemic has been the accelerated shift from physical to digital. And that in a digital transformation, what was expected to take two years now instead has been compressed into several months. And we've certainly benefited from that sector shift. But it's in large part because of the hard work that we've undertaken from a company to transform like as how we think about our integration layer, how do we think about data movement, how do we think about data security? That I think allows us to position ourselves much differently and play a much more critical role in the reopening of the economy. If you look in the market, you'll see that we are playing a significant role in how we power charitable giving. In this new dynamic, how do we give people access to their stimulus checks and become a supporter of the paycheck protection program, Then ultimately, how do we start to conduct commerce in a touchless manner? All of these things are now becoming the new norm, whereas they weren't the new norm before. And if we had not made these steps, and I'm not saying that we're anywhere near where we want to be ultimately, but if we had not made these steps in thinking about integration, thinking about data, thinking about security, et cetera, et cetera, we wouldn't have been positioned to be able to respond to this significant shift in the marketplace.

That's pretty powerful. And Dan, I know you and your team have had such a critical role in shaping that future and in accelerating your own digital initiatives. Can you share the role of IT in business? How has your organization changed the approach to kind of the business interlock? And how does that. I guess lessons learned for those that are listening in other fellow IT executives. How would you encourage your peers to show up and kind of drive that business IT strategy?

It's truly accelerated the partnership. I think that many would say that in a traditional world, the tech organization responds to the business and in many cases can find itself taking orders from the business. I think what I've seen with the pandemic, building on some of the goodwill that was already in our internal ecosystem, is tech now being an active partner. And in being an active partner, sometimes being the vocal partner who has to show the way and bringing together what is happening not only in the tech community, but what other companies are doing and how do we learn and complement what Other companies are doing. How do they learn from us? You make a good point, Lindsey. The new norm is still being written, but what's certain is that the new norm will not be reflective, will not be the old, and it will be reflective of some hybrid between in office and work, from home or physical and virtual. And in thinking of the new, we need to remind ourselves, like I said, that our employees want to do, they want to know, they want to learn, and they want that sense of community. How these experiences are delivered will change, and technology will need to democratize these experience so that there's consistency in the experience, regardless of where the employee is geographically and whether they chose on that day to come into the office or not come into the office. I don't want our employees. Right now, all of our employees arguably are equal. They're all a box on a video screen. And as we begin to, at some point, migrate back to an in office, in campus environment, I don't want those employees who are, for whatever reason at home to feel disenfranchised and not feel that they can collaborate and be part of a working team and be able to be successful just like their colleagues who might be in the office on that particular day. That's great.

Well, let's go. Last question here. Let's go with that as the vision for the future.

Right.

Truly a place where we can engage, motivate, drive collaboration across employees wherever they are, whatever their situation, as well as accelerate digital agendas. What would you leave? Parting wish, parting thoughts for those tuning in, actionable next steps. Where would you start? If you were listening in, in terms of driving a digital agenda, in terms of getting to that vision that you just laid out. And I have kind of top three takeaways.

Yeah. I think there's a strong intersection between digital transformation and modernizing our ways of working as informed by the pandemic. And as we think about what does success look like for us, we've begun to anchor on four things. So sorry, I know you said three. Lindsey Aldo, this is good.

We'll go with four. You get four.

One is that as a company, we never want to be constrained from a scale and reach perspective. So I call it scale and reach independence. Two, that we want to position our employees to create value. And this goes back to my comment of we want our employees to be artists in whatever field they play in and not to have to worry about the mechanics. We want a healthy workforce. And when I think of a healthy workforce, I don't think of just output. I think of output. Velocity, innovation, learning, wellness, engagement, etc. All of those together in my mind create a very healthy workforce. So we want that and that we believe a healthy workforce will deliver a healthy customer experience. And lastly, we need to continue to challenge ourselves to find ways to insulate our workforce from any future Black Swan event. I think this pandemic was a wake up call for many of us and it's a significant call to action for all tech leaders as to how do we plan ahead and how do we insulate our workforce from these kind of events.

That was awesome. I have no better clothes. So Dan, this is a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Great to see you. Glad you're well and with that, Leah, back to you.

Thank you Lindsey.

Thank you so much Lindsey and Dan, that was a great conversation. I really liked the API first integration and the talk about looking at taking the mechanics out of integration and looking at as a data railroad. Love that. Now I'm excited to hand it off to Jamil for a demo on how companies like PayPal can leverage the Mulesoft AnyPoint platform to unlock business critical data. Jamil, Take it away.

Hi everyone, my name is Jamil and I'm joining you from the sunny west coast in California. I work with the mulesoft product marketing team and today I'm really excited to show you how the AnyPoint platform can help your company unlock business critical data from various enterprise systems. To do this, we are going to look at an example that uses mulesoft to get a real time view of employee data. In Tableau we will see how mulesoft helps you access workday easily, change to the data formats that you need, and finally load it into Tableau. Let's start our demo from anypoint Exchange. Anypoint Exchange is the marketplace to save, share and reuse technical assets that your company has already built. They can be shared internally for developers, across your company, or externally for partners and the larger ecosystem. You can also discover and reuse pre built assets that are produced by mulesoft. There are hundreds of out of the box system specific connectors, best practices templates, examples, APIs and more for you to choose from. Let's start by looking at the Workday Connector. This connector allows businesses to extend the capabilities of Workday and enable interoperability with HR systems like recruiting and payroll. Let's use this connector for our use case and to do so we will switch to Anypoint Studio, our desktop IDE to build APIs and integrations. Again, instead of starting from scratch, let's import an example that our company has already built. Out Studio is also integrated with anypoint Exchange, so we can find the templates and examples right from here. It comes with a library of connectors to help you build with clicks and not code. To use a connector you can simply drag and drop it to the canvas. We already have the Workday connector added to this project. It simplifies access to a workday by providing simple and easy to use operations. In this project, we're getting the employee data from workday and exposing it as an API endpoint. We also need to transform the data formats coming from workday. Transforming the data is also easy. You can drag the fields from the left hand side to the right or write your custom transformation script right here. Once we deploy the application, we will get an API URL like this one. Now that the API is built, developers and analysts across your organization can find and reuse this API using AnyPoint Exchange. Let's see how you can surface the same employee data inside Tableau. We are going to use the Web Data connector and paste the API URL here. As we select the getemployeedata, a real time API call is being made to fetch the data. Now once we update the data, we can see a data set ready to use in Tableau. The HR team now has a real time view into employee data pulled straight from Workday. Today's example was about unlocking employee data. However, the same concepts of creating system APIs work with any system and help you unlock any Data using the AnyPoint platform.

Thank you Jamil. That was great. I love building connectors with clicks and no code because I'm all about that. You want to get hands on and learn too? Please check out trailhead.com where you can learn all of these things for free on the trailhead.com our free online learning platform. Now you all know the drill if you want to see today's performance. You want to come on over to Salesforce Live right now. You don't want to miss this one. So please come on over to salesforce.com live. So if you're watching on Twitter, head on over. We're going to be waiting for you.