I'm sorry, American Express
The financial services giant is paying $300 million for Revolution Money, the online payment platform spearheaded by former AOL whiz kid Steve Case. It may be a perfectly reasonable purchase for AmEx, but I had to laugh at the headlines that played this up as a serious threat to eBay's
Do we really need to go through a history lesson, here?
The dot-com graveyard is littered with companies that tried to take on PayPal. Yahoo!'s
Revolution's MoneyExchange platform has potential, but bigger companies failed when PayPal was significantly smaller. No one is likely to catch it now.
Then again, maybe this deal isn't so much about making a dent in PayPal as it is for the name of self-preservation. A key component of MoneyExchange is the RevolutionCard credit card. Offering no interchange fees and a mere 0.5% transaction and settlement hit, Revolution has already landed a fast-growing list of merchants including Whole Foods Market
So kudos to AmEx for killing a disruptor while it was still in the crib. Slaying PayPal, however, is a different matter entirely.