PayPal has apparently unearthed a new revenue opportunity within its acquisition of Honey, a Morgan Stanley document shows.
According to the Morgan Stanley research note today, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said at an event hosted by the investment bank that Honey has data revenue opportunities that were apparently not on PayPal’s radar when it acquired the shopping rewards platform.
PayPal agreed to acquire Honey for $4 billion last November.
Schulman said Honey lets PayPal offer consumers “demand curves.”
Founded in 2012, Honey resides in a desktop browser extension and app to share discounts during a customer’s purchase process. The company also offers rewards points for purchases from partner brands, along with a tool that monitors price fluctuations of goods. Honey had 17 million monthly active users, according to PayPal, and generated $100 million in revenue in 2018.
At the time of the deal, Schulman said Honey would help PayPal “drive engagement and consumer loyalty to merchants on its platform.” But Schulman on Monday cited another advantage.
“Mr. Schulman called out an opportunity to leverage Honey’s price-tracking capabilities to create demand curves for consumers, and ultimately use this data to fulfill discounts for merchants,” Morgan Stanley wrote. “This fits PYPL’s effort to help merchants more effectively allocate their marketing spend toward driving sales, rather than views and clicks.”
Morgan Stanley added that PayPal “remains one of our preferred names.”
PayPal [ticker: PYPL] has a market capitalization of about $135 billion.
Listen to the interview with Schulman here.





