Payments company PayPal ( PYPL ) applied for an industrial bank license in Utah, it said Monday, with the goal of creating a lending division called PayPal Bank.
The company, which also operates the PYUSD stablecoin through a partnership with Paxos, said in a press release that it intends to “provide business lending solutions” to small businesses and interest-bearing savings accounts to other customers. It also intends to work with credit card networks.
PayPal also applied for deposit insurance through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
In a statement, PayPal CEO and President Alex Chriss said, “Securing capital remains a significant hurdle for small businesses striving to grow and scale.”
“Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunity across the United States,” he said.
Utah’s industrial banks are subject to “the same regulatory and supervisory oversight as commercial banks,” but their activities “are not as restricted,” according to the Utah Department of Financial Institutions website, with these types of institutions not subject to the Bank Holding Company Act, which regulates federal banks and prevents monopolization.
While PayPal’s statement on Monday did not touch on its crypto-specific activities, PayPal has recently grown its foray into crypto, adding wallet-to-wallet crypto transfer functionality earlier this year and allowing its users to create personal links to send or request money via crypto.
It has also launched a Pay with Crypto feature for merchant services that acts as an intermediary to let merchants accept cryptocurrencies as payment.
Monday’s filing comes on the heels of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a federal banking regulator, granting initial trust charters to five different crypto firms, including stablecoin issuers Circle and Paxos, Ripple, BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets.
