Dive Brief:

• With eBay and PayPal about to split into two companies July 20, there’s renewed speculation that PayPal could be an acquisition target post-split. 

• With mobile payments on the rise, PayPal says about 20% of its business and rising is on mobile, and is the mobile payment provider behind the scenes for app-based transactions for the likes of Uber.

• Venture capitalist Jeff Jordan, who helped eBay buy PayPal in 2002 when he was eBay general manager and who later served as PayPal president, says that Google could benefit immensely by acquiring the soon-to-be-independent payments system.

Dive Insight:

Once it became clear that activist investor Carl Icahn would get his way and that eBay and PayPal would split, there’s been much speculation about what would come after. The split is happening because Icahn and those that agree with him have said that PayPal is better on its own. But Google, Amazon, Alibaba, and others have also been mentioned as possible suitors. A Google buy especially makes sense to many because the company is working so hard to move its Google Wallet along and because it could afford a large purchase. 

Now Jeff Jordan tells Wired magazine that he thought that Google would have benefited from a PayPal partnership back when Google was developing its Checkout payments service, which has essentially been replaced by Android Pay.

Of the several interested parties, including banks and giants like Facebook, Google is among the few companies that could easily afford what would be a pricey acquisition. But Jordan thinks it would be a smart buy for the tech giant.

“You could make the experience so seamless that Google starts behaving like Amazon,” he told Wired.