PayPal will hire 1,000 engineers for its development centres across Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad over the course of the coming year, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. As digital payments adoption has grown in the past year, in the wake of the pandemic, PayPal said that it needs to focus on building and scaling its artificial-intelligence, machine learning, data science, risk, security, and customer experience practices going forward. While the global digital payments giant has witnessed significant growth in its user-base and merchant-base in the past year, posting a net profit of $4.2 billion in fiscal year 2020 (calendar) up by 71% year-on-year, it is shuttering its payments gateway business in India by the end of March. Going forward, PayPal will continue to operate its cross-border trading platform, enabling local businesses to export their products abroad, in addition to its development centres. PayPal India will hire engineers across software, product development, data science, risk analytics and business analytics streams at entry, mid-level and senior roles, it said. In 2020, the company processed $1.4 billion worth of sales for more than 360,000 merchants in the country. But due to heavy competition in the payments gateway space, from legacy payments companies and new fintechs, the company was not able to compete effectively and its losses grew. In FY19, the company's losses grew to ₹8.13 crore as of March 2019 from ₹2.3 crore in the previous year on the back of revenues worth ₹654.7 crore in FY19 compared to ₹261 crore…
