Yao succeeds Jeff Liao, who was previously overseeing the Greater China region for eBay.
A 20-year veteran in information technology, electronic payment processing and financial service industry, Yao was most recently the VP of NCR Financial Service North Asia, and he held also various executive positions at IBM and EDS for 16 years.
He managed more than 16 million card processing across Asia-Pacific region and worked with Chinese major banks deployed more than 18,000 ATMs in China.
“I am delighted to join the PayPal team at this exciting moment as e-commerce continues to grow at an astouding pace in the region,” said Yao, “ Paypal is at the forefront in helping businesses as well as consumers enjoy e-commerce in a safer and easier manner.”
PayPal has nearly 375,000 active accounts in Greater China. In 2009, total payment volume in Greater China was $3.1 billion and increased 45 per cent from 2008.
SaSa and YesAsia are among the large merchants in Hong Kong using PayPal as the online payment solution for their shopping portal.
PayPal is an eBay company and is made up of three leading online payment services: the PayPal global payment service, the Payflow Gateway and Bill Me Later. PayPal has more than 81 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world.
Earlier this year, Facebook brought in PayPal to offer advertisers and users a way to make payments.