Paypal introduced Students Accounts, a program designed to balance convenience for parents and their kids with financial responsibility. The program is centered on the use of a debit card. It was first presented in beta version back in December 2008, and has taken several months before being officially launched to US consumers.

Just in time for the school season, Student Accounts gets rid of the hassle brought by everyday exchange of money between parents and their kids. Paypal aims to foster good spending habits among teenagers through being responsible for their own money.

With the program, parents can create a maximum of four sub-accounts with fund transfer capabilities on a one-time or recurring basis. Parents will be able to monitor and control their teen's account activities.

Paypal could highly benefit from the program through expanding their market to young adults. Debit card transactions also boost Paypal's revenue, through the sellers honoring the cards.

A few days ago, Paypal was hit by  a world-wide system outage, leaving millions of customers temporarily unable to complete transactions. An internal network hardware issue was reported to have caused the downtime. Just last week, several groups slammed the online payment service when new fees were added without notifying its customers. With all the snags Paypal has been facing these past few days, Student Accounts came in a perfect timing. While other websites hastily change their web design or SEO tactics to retain visitors, Paypal works wonders through adding new service features. Several customers have expressed their gripes over the service, but Paypal definitely knows how to turn things around.

Viral marketing has been proven beneficial for Paypal, but its ability to immerse customers with striking new features amidst controversies has become a useful trend that has saved it countless of times.