PayPal continued steady growth this quarter, reaching 192 million active users and 30 transactions per user. It also recorded $87 billion on 1.5 billion total transactions. Venmo accounted for $4.9 billion of that, and mobile accounted for approximately 30% of PayPal’s total transactions.

That 192 million, by the way, counts 177 million consumers and 15 million merchants. PayPal reported its third-quarter earnings yesterday.

But the real story of PayPal’s quarter was partnerships — some high profile, some less so. There were the partnerships with Visa and Mastercard, and some elaboration was given on this. The Mastercard deal allows users to “easily identify and choose Mastercard within the PayPal wallet,” CEO Dan Schulman said. It also exempts PayPal from increased processing fees and locks in rates for years to come.

A deal with Alibaba was also announced, as a payment operation within the global Ali Express marketplace. Schulman said China represents a strong growth opportunity for PayPal. He also mentioned partnerships with Facebook and Apple. The Apple deal is for Venmo to appear as a payment option within Siri and iMessage. For Facebook, a PayPal spokesman told Bank Innovation, “We partner with Facebook to power some of their most important commerce initiatives including in-message payments for Uber, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, and Lyft.”

Schulman rattled off several other deals and integrations — Visa Checkout is now part of Braintree, as is China UnionPay within China; PayPal is part of Apple Pay for the web; PayPal is part of Masterpass, and is a payment option in Uber in several Latin American markets.

Venmo continues to grow and is on track for a $20 billion run rate — this is the volume of Chase QuickPay, the peer-to-peer money transfer service of the nation’s largest bank. Venmo users use the service more than twice a week, Schulman said. (As for what it is used for, see our previous post.)

PayPal Credit accounts for 2% of the entire business, Schulman said, adding that the company is “comfortable with credit.” More will be disclosed on future calls, he said.

As for the future, Schulman said PayPal wanted to move “beyond being a button on a website” to do two things:

• Become a full-service platform for merchants
• Deepen engagement with consumers from 2.5 times a month to two times a week.

Schulman also emphasized repeatedly the importance of the network deals for PayPal’s future, particularly for getting card-present rates at the point of sale and preferential processing fees.

To learn more about payments, join us in Tel Aviv for Bank Innovation Israel, Nov. 1-3. Register here.