PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as 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. PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for hand-held devices. Having had no success with that business model, however, it switched its focus to a digital wallet. The first version of the PayPal electronic payments system was launched in 1999. (Source: Wikipedia.org, CC BY-SA)