PayPal’s ‘Best Quarter Ever’ Credited to Venmo
PayPal Holdings Inc. reported total payments volume of $81 billion for the quarter, up 29% from a year ago. Its newer services – Venmo and Xoom – were at the center of it all.
Venmo processed nearly $3.2 billion in payments this quarter, up 150% YoY, proving once again that Venmo is the best thing going on for the platform. And while previously users could only pay for select businesses through Venmo, PayPal’s Chief Executive Officer Daniel Schulman said yesterday Venmo is coming soon to the entire customer base.
We made good progress with our Pay with Venmo pilot. Early customer results and feedback have provided strong validation around the demand for Venmo as a way to pay in app. This feedback has helped us to fine tune our processes, procedures and value proposition. And we have now widened our pilot to include approximately 550,000 Venmo users. We are on track to expand to more merchants and open the service to our full Venmo customer base in the second half of this year.
Xoom – a global digital money transfer platform – also showed strong digital growth, the company said yesterday, with a “record” activation quarter, up 70% year-over-year. PayPal acquired Xoom in a $890 million transaction in July 2015.
Overall, PayPal ended its quarter with 184 million active accounts, up from 179 million from the last quarter, highlighting the increased engagement on its new app (launched in February). Here’s what Schulman had to say about the app:
It’s simple, easy. It’s driving increased consumer engagement. And it also enables us for consumers to now be able to use their mobile phone in-store whether that be through NFC or QR codes. And the way that I think about in-store is, really, in-store, online, in-app, they’re all coming together.It’s all moving towards mobile. We want to be able to utilize for merchants this underlying platform, so that we can be their OS, do 100% share of checkout
PayPal is on track to its “100% checkout” goal, according to Schulman, with new brand partnerships in the quarter, including Sephora, Air France, and FreshDirect.
One other thing that drove customer engagement in the quarter was the Super Bowl ad back in February, which “drove significant increases in the perception of PayPal in the weeks that followed the commercial’s first airing,” CEO said.
Here’s a flashback, for all those that missed the ad. (Money well spent, PayPal.)
