PayPal and The Royal Bank of Scotland have won the "Best New Prepaid Card Product of the Year" at Card Awards 2009. The award recognized the PayPal Top Up product, which is processed by global payments services provider, TSYS.

PayPal partnered with The Royal Bank of Scotland to launch the PayPal Top Up Card in August 2008. The prepaid product has made the PayPal brand more visible offline and has attracted new customers who did not previously have a PayPal account.

Meanwhile, the company announced it has hired Farhad Irani to lead the company's business in Asia Pacific. Reporting to Philipp Justus, PayPal's Senior Vice President of Global Markets, Irani will manage PayPal's domestic and cross border business in all of Asia Pacific and will be based out of PayPal's international headquarters in Singapore.

Asia Pacific is one of PayPal's fastest growing regions with more than 12 million PayPal accounts. PayPal currently offers its services in five Asian languages including Indonesia Bahasa, Japanese, Thai, and simplified and traditional Chinese. The service supports payments from 190 markets in 19 global currencies, including local currencies such as the Singapore Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, Japanese Yen, Chinese RMB, New Zealand Dollar and Australian Dollar.

Irani joins PayPal from Standard Chartered in Singapore where he was global head of credit cards and personal loans. A native of India, Irani has more than 25 years of experience in retail banking and credit cards and has lived and worked in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan prior to settling in Singapore.