PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites, and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee in exchange for benefits such as one-click transactions and password memory.Established in 1998 as Confinity,PayPal had its initial public offering in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion.In 2015, eBay spun off PayPal to eBay's shareholders.The company ranked 204th on the 2019 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue.