Payments platform PayPal had $139 billion in total payment volume in 2Q18, up 29% YOY, and expects to add 30 million net new actives by the end of the year, according to the company’s earnings call yesterday.
Of that $139 billion, 39% of the total payment volume, or $54 billion, was mobile. Just $14.2 billion came from Venmo.
PayPal has made no secret about the importance of mobile payments for the company; with subsidiaries like P2P app Venmo and money transfer Xoom all adding to the mobile payment volume. In an effort to increase payment volume, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said the company would focus on strategic partnerships and acquisitions.
Another important goal for PayPal, according to Schulman, is to become a full commerce solution for merchants.
The partnership-acquisition strategy will service both these goals. Schulman pointed to PayPal’s partnerships with Santander Bank, HDFC Bank, and Clydesdale Bank to expand its presence in international markets like the U.K. and India.
Then there are partnerships like the one PayPal has with Google, which serves its core U.S. market.
Schulman said:
We announced this quarter that users in the US who add PayPal to any one of Google’s services will soon be able to pay across the Google ecosystem anywhere that PayPal is offered as a payment method.
For example when a user adds PayPal to their Google Play account, it will automatically enable their linked PayPal account to be a payment option across popular Google services like Gmail, YouTube, Google Pay and Google Store, including where Google offers peer to peer payments. We strengthened our partnership with eBay. We signed an agreement to extend our long standing consumer financing offer to eBay’s marketplace.
Schulman also pointed out that online retailer eBay, which earlier this year ditched PayPal for Adyen, will “continue to accept and promote PayPal Credit through 2025.”
Of course, when it comes to strategic acquisitions. PayPal’s behavior over the past two quarters speaks for itself. Most recently, PayPal closed its $120 million acquisition of fraud protection company Simility. Prior to this, in June, it announced plans to acquire payout platform Hyperwallet for $400 million and AI-prediction platform, Jetlore for $16 million.
And then, of course, there’s PayPal’s $2.2 billion acquisition of Swedish small business commerce platform iZettle in May.
PayPal will continue to make strategic acquisitions throughout this year and next. Schulman, just last month, iterated plans of spending between $1 billion and $3 billion in acquisitions per year.
For 2Q18, PayPal reported revenues of $3.8 billion, up 18% from $3.1 billion in the same quarter last year.
PayPal, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PYPL, is trading down 1.5% at $90 per share, with a market cap of $106.9 billion.






