eBay (News - Alert) has named its mobile unit chief, David Marcus, the new CEO of PayPal (News - Alert). Marcus who is currently PayPal’s vice president of Mobile, will begin his new job as CEO of PayPal on Monday.

Former PayPal CEO Scott Thompson left in January for a new job as CEO at Yahoo in a very peculiar way. According to sources inside of Yahoo, Thompson “cold-emailed” his way into a job. Yahoo’s executive search firm Heidrich & Struggles got him the job at eBay, so it was contractually bound from approaching him about the Yahoo job. Thompson decided to take matters into his own hands and reach out directly to Yahoo board members and began pitching himself for the job. Obviously it worked, since Scott Thompson began as Yahoo’s CEO in January.

His predecessor at PayPal, David Marcus (News - Alert), was chosen by eBay to bring a “startup energy” to the Office of Chief Executive at PayPal. eBay acquired the online payments business in 2002 and today it accounts for 40 percent of sales on Ebay.com. PayPal is a large and fast-growing business. Sources inside of eBay said that it was in search of an entrepreneur with experience building businesses from scratch to handle the firm. Marcus will report to John Donahoe, present and CEO of eBay, PayPal’s parent company.

PayPal faces new competition from startups Venmo and Square, but it is rising to the challenge by announcing a card-swiping device that scans checks and works with all four major credit-card networks. The reader, called PayPal Here, can be plugged into any smartphone or tablet and accepts payments for offline purchases. The device is aimed directly at Square which makes its living on the offline purchase enabled by its app and card-scanner.

The choice of an internal candidate is a strong vote of confidence for PayPal’s existing management team and sends a message that eBay is serious about continuing its focus on mobile technologies.