Bonjour. Thank you very much for the invitation to come here and speak today. I look forward to sharing with you how PayPal helps Canadian businesses to thrive and Canadian consumers to securely pay anytime and anywhere across the emerging digital commerce landscape.
PayPal is an eBay Inc. company, along with StubHub and Kijiji. Through eBay's marketplace, we connect millions of buyers and sellers across the globe and in fact enabled over $200 billion of commerce last year. PayPal was founded in 1998 to allow users to transfer money or pay securely online. Today, we have 143 million PayPal accounts globally and 5.5 million here in Canada.
I want to describe briefly what PayPal is and how it works. You sign up for a free PayPal account, either online or through the mobile app, and then you link your bank account, credit card, and/or debit card to that account. This enables you to make highly secure transactions online because no one sees your account details. In your physical wallet, you probably have some cash—if your kids haven't swiped it—a credit card, and maybe a debit card, so you can think of PayPal as a bit of a digital wallet, whereby you can access your money from your PayPal account on your laptop or smartphones and then shop online across Canada and at millions of stores globally.
The thing I particularly like about PayPal is that you can also use PayPal to raise funds for your favourite causes or to donate online to various charities. You can do this through CanadaHelps or directly to charities such as the SickKids Foundation or the Canadian Red Cross. You can also use PayPal to securely send money to your friends and family.
Access to your account is quite easy. All you need is an Internet-connected device. Whether it's your laptop or your cellphone, or even gaming consoles and television sets, all are access points to your account.
I think you probably all know that online commerce is booming across Canada. Fifty-six per cent of Canadian Internet users said they bought goods or services online last year. However, what I find kind of interesting is that only 20% of Canadian businesses are actually selling online today.
The opportunity to drive business growth, consumer delight, and the Canadian economy is quite compelling and substantial. As we all know, people are increasingly connected through these devices, and they have increasing expectations in regard to being able to pay any time, anywhere, and in any way they want, so a brick-and-mortar retail presence alone just isn't enough anymore. Thankfully, retailers such as our partners, the Hudson's Bay Company, Roots, Best Buy, and Future Shop, among many others, are recognizing the need to have a multi-channel footprint to cater to the connected consumer.
Also, as we know, small businesses in Canada are a critical engine of the economy. Every five minutes, a small business signs up to accept PayPal payments and opens their virtual doors to new consumers in Canada and around the world. There are no set-up costs or hidden fees for a small business to start accepting payments, and our fees are completely transparent and published on our website.
I have a brief comment about mobile. The next commerce revolution is being driven completely by mobile. Sixty-two per cent of Canadians have a smartphone. You may not know that this is the third-highest penetration level of any country in the world. The reality of this fact is that it's changing how we shop and pay. Businesses are interacting with these consumers in completely new ways, and the expectations, as I've said, are changing. Just to give a sense for how big this trend is, in 2013 PayPal processed $27 billion in mobile payments, up from $600 million only three years ago. There are many examples—we'll show some in the demo here—of how we are helping Canadian businesses, small and large, securely engage with today's connected consumer in useful ways.
Let me talk a bit about security. It's the foundation of our entire business. We recognize that our success and the success of commerce generally depends on our ability to provide trust and confidence to businesses and consumers. Without that trust, digital commerce will fail to reach its full potential. As I've said, security is a fundamental building block of PayPal's business. We allow people to send money or pay for goods and services without ever having to expose their financial or personal information. It also allows businesses to receive payments without the costs and potential liability associated with processing and securing financial information.
I look forward to answering any of your questions.