PayPal is ready to go its own way.

Revenue for PayPal exceeded that of its sister unit, eBay Marketplaces, for the first time in 1Q, it was revealed in yesterday’s earnings call for eBay Inc. PayPal posted $2.1 billion on the quarter, compared with $2.06 for Marketplaces. PayPal’s revenue was 14% higher than the previous quarter, while for Marketplaces it marked a 4% decline.

This bodes well for PayPal and casts doubts on eBay’s viability without its payments arm.

CEO John Donahoe noted that the San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc. had filed a Form-10 in 1Q and expects eBay and PayPal to go their separate ways in 3Q. After separation, PayPal will still send about $25 million to $50 million to eBay annually, CFO Robert Swan said.

PayPal processed $62 billion in net payments — 18% over 4Q14 — and grew to 165 million active users in 1Q, Donahoe said. It also processed more than a billion mobile transaction on the quarter, up 40% year-over-year. PayPal closed the quarter with $2.4 billion in cash, and as a goodbye gift, eBay will give it another $3.5 billion from its own $11.7 billion in cash.

Dan Schulman, CEO-elect of PayPal, commented, “Everything we’ve done in the first six months of my tenure is positioning PayPal to take advantage of what I see as one of the greatest opportunities for growth that the payments industry has ever seen.”

Schulman noted the contributions of payments processor Braintree, acquired in September 2013, and the high expectations for Paydiant, acquired this month, going forward. Paydiant, a mobile wallet provider, is expected to deliver strength in the point-of-sale world, where PayPal has struggled to gain traction.

Schulman laid out his vision for PayPal in the mobile commerce world toward the end of the call:

And so what I would like the PayPal platform to be, and what we are building towards and have a lot of capabilities already, is the ability to be able to utilize your mobile phone, but not just via NFC, but QR codes, Bluetooth, HCE, really depends on what the merchant has upgraded towards. I think if you bet on a single technology, it’s a risky proposition and it takes a lot longer to move into the marketplace.

The second thing is I’m a big believer that you don’t want to just enable a form factor change. We don’t want to just substitute a card swipe for a phone tap; you really want to think about what is the value proposition change that you are going to do.

How can you with that phone tap enable a merchant to get ever closer to their consumers through rewards loyalty, couponing offering, and associate that with the payment choice of type a consumer wants to pay with, whether it be a debit card or credit card, private label, Bill Me Later, whatever it may be, that’s what we want to provide. And so you are seeing us look at our platform and our goals are to be the world’s largest open digital payments platform. And to do that we have to build with those tenants in line.

If Donahoe has mixed feeling about the impending separation of the companies he has shepherded since 2008, he didn’t express it. He spent much of 2014 battling with activist investor Carl Icahn, who has called for PayPal to be spun off for years, before eventually conceding.

“We believe more than ever that separation is the best path for eBay and PayPal, and the right approach to delivering sustainable value to shareholders,” Donahoe said. “We are moving forward with clarity and speed.”