Yahoo Reportedly Hires Another PayPal Exec

If Yahoo (YHOO) is about to strike big in payments, it may be building its arsenal from PayPal’s talent pool.

Sam Shrauger left his position as PayPal's vice president of global product and experience to head Yahoo's commerce division, The New York Times reported Tuesday. 

Representatives from PayPal and Yahoo were not immediately available to comment.

Shrauger's reported move would not be unprecedented. Yahoo's new CEO, Scott Thompson, resigned from PayPal abruptly in January to take the job. PayPal is a unit of eBay (EBAY).

Until 2007, Yahoo had its own a bill-payment service, which routed payments through CheckFree. CheckFree is now a part of Fiserv (FISV).

On a conference call with Yahoo investors in January, Thompson dodged questions about what Yahoo might do in payments. But he said mobile devices would be critical to serving Yahoo's base of 700 million users.

"Mobile, I think, is a really big question for Yahoo and a really big opportunity for this business," Thompson said in the conference call.