PayPal has new Asia Pacific head

PayPal, an eBay company, today announced that it has hired Farhad Irani to lead the company’s business in Asia Pacific.

Reporting to Philipp Justus, PayPal’s senior vice president of global markets, Farhad will manage PayPal’s domestic and cross border business in all of Asia Pacific. Farhad will be based out of PayPal’s international headquarters in Singapore.

Asia Pacific is one of PayPal’s fastest growing regions with more than 12 million PayPal accounts. PayPal currently offers its services in five Asian languages including Indonesia Bahasa, Japanese, Thai, and simplified and traditional Chinese.

The service supports payments from 190 markets in 19 global currencies, including local currencies such as the Australian Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, Japanese Yen, Chinese RMB, New Zealand Dollar and Singapore Dollar.

“Currently 45 percent of PayPal revenues come from outside of the US, and we expect the business to continue to grow in the coming years,” said Justus. “We’re thrilled to welcome Mr. Irani as an industry veteran with the local market expertise to unleash PayPal’s potential in Asia Pacific.”

Farhad joins PayPal from Standard Chartered in Singapore where he was global head of credit cards and personal loans. A native of India, Farhad has more than 25 years of experience in retail banking and credit cards and has lived and worked in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan prior to settling in Singapore.