PayPal shares plunged as much as 12 percent Thursday after eBay decided to dump its long-time partner in favor of a competitor. But Bill Ready, the payment processing company’s COO, said investors need time to digest this news. “One of the things people don’t understand fully about this is that when we spun out of eBay that there was an operating agreement in place that talked about, over time, we become two fully independent companies,” he told Cheddar in an interview. “Not only would eBay be able to work with others for things like card processing, but also that we’d be able to partner with all the fastest growing marketplaces around the world.” EBay announced a multi-year deal Wednesday for Amsterdam-based Adyen to provide back-end payment processing. PayPal will still remain a payment option for eBay customers, but it won’t be featured as prominently. That’s a big change for PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 and spun off in 2015. But Ready says the company’s other businesses hold more opportunity. “Our marketplace business outside of eBay is already many tens of billions of dollars in volume, growing at about 50 percent per year, versus our legacy eBay business which is growing at about 4 percent per year.” For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/paypal-coo-responds-to-companys-break-up-with-ebay).
