PayPal‘s P2P service Venmo has exceeded analysts’ first-quarter estimates in two key areas: annual revenue run rate and number of users, according to statements from PayPal’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday.
Venmo’s annual revenue run rate coming out of Q1 2019, PayPal said, exceeded $300 million, compared to the more than $200 million annualized revenue run rate reported at the end of 2018. Also in the first quarter, Venmo added more than 40 million new users and processed $21 billion in total payment volume (TPV), up 73%, year-over-year.
This is the first time PayPal announced the number of users it added to Venmo per quarter. The reason, PayPal CEO and President Dan Schulman said, is because there were “a lot of numbers that we saw flying out there that were inaccurate, and we thought it was important to set the record straight.”
PayPal acquired Venmo in 2013 through its $800 million purchase of Braintree. Since its acquisition, Venmo, a social-media payment tool popular among millennials, had failed to earn PayPal any meaningful revenue — until now. While a significant part of this growth can be attributed to initiatives, including the Venmo debit card, launched last June, the key driver is customer engagement created through merchant partnerships, said Schulman and COO Bill Ready.
“We’ve got multiple initiatives that are monetizing for Venmo,” Ready said in the earnings call. “We’ve got the Venmo debit card, we’ve got pay with Venmo, we’ve got instant transfer. We feel like it’s great progress, but it’s not really concentrated in any one of those things. And what we’re really seeing across the user base is those Venmo users — while still growing in number quite rapidly — are also deepening their engagement with us.”
Schulman added to this explanation:
We’ve seen a tremendous number of new customers coming on board. But we actually have an increasing engagement curve. In other words, the engagement of Venmo users increased over time, not churn over time. And so, to us, that really demonstrates some of what Bill was just saying — that our base truly does want to engage in the service.
An example of this is a Venmo-launched customer engagement partnership with fast-food franchise Chipotle to engage customers through Venmo payouts’ rewards program. In the first week of the campaign’s launch, Chipotle surpassed its campaign objective with 1 million signups.
“These are pretty impressive numbers,” Schulman said. “And we see a lot more opportunities to work with brands to engage with their consumers inside the structural fees.”
Also Read: Venmo’s Instant Cashout Option to Create Revenue for PayPal in 2019
During the first quarter, PayPal added 9.3 million net new active accounts, up 17% YOY, bringing total active accounts to 277 million. During the quarter, PayPal reported net revenue of $4.1 billion, up from $3.6 billion in the same quarter last year. Today, PayPal is trading at $109.20 per share, up 2%, with a market capitalization of $127.9 billion.






