Big 12, Big Ten announce partnership with PayPal to payout revenue share to student-athletes

Colleges are preparing for revenue-sharing with student-athletes beginning on July 1st. In anticipation of that, the Big 12 and Big Ten have announced a new partnership with PayPal to pay out their student-athletes.

Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark appeared on Get Up alongside PayPal CEO Alex Chriss. There, Yormark dove into what made the partnership a good idea for the conference at this point in time.

“July 1 starts rev-share with our student-athletes,” Yormark said. “A long time coming and well deserved from a conference perspective, but I speak beyond just the Big 12. I speak for all of collegiate athletics; we need a reliable payment platform to distribute money to our student-athletes.”

Revenue-sharing stems from the recent House settlement. That is going to lead to several new changes to college athletics and NIL specifically. That includes third-party oversight over NIL, a new enforcement agency, and roster limits. Arguably most important, it also allows for revenue-sharing between schools and student-athletes, with each school being able to share $20.5 million annually.

“We’ve [Big 12 and PayPal] been at this for over 14 months,” Yormark said. “Trying to figure out if there was a place and a point of entry for PayPal in this world of collegiate athletics, and we found it on the heels of the [House] settlement and rev-share. Truly excited about it. When you think about PayPal and Venmo, probably the most culturally relevant payment platform globally. 100 million customers, including consumers and merchants. It’s a big opportunity for the Big 12. Big for college athletics and I truly believe that the product is ubiquitous across all campuses, and today, yes, we’re announcing two conferences, but it’s going to go well beyond that moving forward.”

Per Ross Dellenger, the Big 12 deal with PayPal is significant. It’s added value of about $100 million over five years, or ~$1M per school annually.

“PayPal and Venmo are the applications that college students are using now,” Alex Chriss said. “Over half of college students are using Venmo today, and it’s the ecosystem that they use. Their parents are giving them money. It’s how they’re paying for their pizzas. It’s the ecosystem of the economy of college students. Now, they’re able to get the payouts from revenue share, will be able to do NIL distributions. We’ll be able to give them a debit card. We’ll be giving debit cards with Venmo with their college logo on them. So, we’re enabling this whole ecosystem to work going forward.”

Ultimately, Yormark believes that this step by the Big 12 and the Big Ten is the first step to some uniformity in how student-athletes are paid. Only time will tell, but Alex Chriss is confident that PayPal and Venmo are the platforms to accomplish this.

“It really is,” Chriss said. “We’re in discussions with all the conferences. PayPal is the ecosystem. The easiest way to distribute these funds. You want to make it seamless and simple for student-athletes to be able to get their dollars in their wallet and be able to spend it, and PayPal is the right way to do it.”