Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.
The Opportunity: Replace a Legacy BI Tool to Empower Thousands
As one of the largest payment providers in the world, millions of people and businesses depend on PayPal’s services to pay, work, and grow. To help users and businesses make the most out of its technology, PayPal’s Global Customer Services (GCS) helps resolve issues and generate solutions from offices across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
After 15 years of relying on its legacy business intelligence tool, PayPal’s GCS organization knew it should be getting more from its technology if it wanted to improve its effectiveness and streamline operations. The legacy tool’s outdated architecture and manual workflows made it hard to scale, expensive to maintain, and inaccessible to non-technical users. Any change required significant development time, and users frequently relied on manual data extracts to do their own analysis, leading to inconsistencies, confusion, and misaligned metrics.
PayPal set an ambitious goal: modernize its GCS analytics platform by retiring its legacy solution by the end of the year. With the clock ticking, PayPal began to search for a modern tool that would allow GCS to streamline operations, simplify user experience, and move toward a scalable, self-service model.
The Solution: Looker and Bytecode IO
Paypal selected Looker for its modern interface, governed data modeling capabilities, and ability to deliver data integrity and trust through a unified semantic layer. To ensure a successful migration within its tight deadline, PayPal engaged Bytecode IO, the #1 Google Cloud Platform data partner, to implement the solution.
Bytecode IO worked with PayPal’s team to develop a strategic roadmap that included phased rollouts, clear governance checkpoints, and a deep focus on enablement. Working cross-functionally with PayPal’s engineering and BI teams, Bytecode IO helped drive alignment, simplify analytics workflows, and accelerate rollout milestones.
The Result: Self-Service at Scale and Growing Adoption
Thanks to Bytecode IO and Looker, PayPal successfully modernized its analytics infrastructure and empowered thousands of users with faster insights, lower overhead, and greater self-sufficiency, creating the foundation for long-term data innovation.
- Bytecode IO completed the Looker implementation and migration from the legacy solution in four months, allowing PayPal to retire its legacy BI tool on schedule.
- PayPal replaced eight legacy cubes with governed LookML golden models, reducing inconsistencies while improving scalability and data trust.
- Bytecode IO built 18 curated, self-service dashboards that let users explore real-time KPIs into how PayPal managed its cases, giving users the data they needed to make faster decisions without worrying about data bottlenecks.
- Bytecode IO provided extensive early training and enablement so that support agents, managers, and analysts around the world could begin creating and maintaining their own dashboards from day one.
- Weekly usage of the new solution nearly doubled within three months of migration, helping GCS achieve more value from its data.
- Champion groups were formed by power users to help scale adoption across departments, build advanced reporting use cases, and promote self-service analytics company-wide.
- Bytecode IO continued to support PayPal with monthly check-ins after implementation, helping the GCS team prepare to scale its analytics capabilities with the planned addition of capabilities like executive dashboards and mobile experiences.
Results at a Glance
- Seamless migration from a legacy tool to Looker within four months
- 2x usage growth within first three months
- Scaled to thousands of users with a governed, self-service analytics culture