Around the world with PayPay vol.13 FROM INSIDE

Around the World with PayPay is a series of articles featuring our global workplace, with people gathered from approximately 40 countries around the world. The article consists of two parts: “FROM OUTSIDE” (published every first Thursday of the month) focuses on a comparison between Japan and the interviewee’s home country. “FROM INSIDE” (published every second Friday of the month) focuses on experiences within PayPay.

Continued from last issue, we’ve sat down with Pavel from Russia! Don’t forget to check out past issues too.

Pavel Parkhomenko

Developer

Country: Russia / Years in Japan: 5 / Location: Kanagawa
“I love my work, I love writing code and programs, and I enjoy life in Japan – it’s a beautiful country with very good people and I love living here”

How are digital payments in Russia?

Another unique thing about Japan is that people actively use cash here. In Russia, I paid for most things using a credit card. I used cash very, very rarely. I can’t actually remember a situation in which I had to use cash. In general, people in Russia use credit cards and debit cards a lot more than cash. There’s nothing like PayPay that’s available.

Why did you join PayPay?

I accomplished some things in Rakuten, after which, I realized that there was not much else to learn. I was on a very good, international team in Rakuten working with big data – I made some great applications to perform complex operations on databases, but in the end I was just maintaining the code that I had written, instead of doing new things. So, I decided to find a place where I could get more experience and grow, and that’s how I joined PayPay. After joining, it took some time to understand what to do and how to position myself so that I was doing things to help me grow. Currently everything is much more clear, I know how to work, know what to do, where I should go, and how I can learn new things.

What’s good about working at PayPay?

A good team is the most valuable thing for me. In PayPay I’m on the DaaS (data as a service) team. I’ve been lucky enough to be on a great team, which is probably the best thing about my job.

Any message to people thinking of joining PayPay?

Let me say welcome, that this is a very good company, that the work here is very interesting, and the future is in applications like PayPay. It is more convenient than credit cards, so there’s a lot of prospects working with a company offering digital payments.