The digital and mobile payments industry is growing at a rapid pace, while the sharing economy continues to disrupt mature industries. PayPal is at the forefront of this digital payments revolution. Against the backdrop, PayPal’s goal is to drive ubiquity across all merchants around the world and continue to increase relevance in consumers’ everyday lives.
For the past five years, PayPal payment volume has grown at a 25 percent compound annual rate. Just last year, the company processed $228 billion in payments, equating to approximately $624 million in payments every day and almost 1 billion mobile transactions.
And with PayPal’s planned separation from eBay, the payments business and CEO-designee Dan Schulman will have the focus and financial flexibility to more quickly capitalize on opportunities, building on PayPal’s existing position as the world’s most trusted way to pay online and on mobile.
At a recent Goldman Sachs conference, eBay Inc. CFO Bob Swan spoke to PayPal’s future growth prospects, saying, “Dan is looking at expanding [PayPal] to more merchants and more geographies, taking this primarily domestic product globally, and from consumers to small businesses as well.”
While more than 50 percent of PayPal’s $7.9 billion revenue last year came from outside of the United States, the company still sees incredible headroom for international growth. PayPal will focus on accelerating innovation and providing PayPal’s 162 million active customer accounts with enhanced feature functionality and access to new merchants.
The company is already expanding innovative technologies like One Touch™ – which enables people to pay across their favorite apps in a single touch – to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Popular apps like U.S.-based sharing economy app Airbnb, Fashionis in Italy and Cabonline in Sweden enabled One Touch in an effort to remove friction from the mobile payment experience. YPlan, a UK-based events app, reported a double-digit increase in conversions shortly after enabling One Touch.
Another area of growth for PayPal is in the peer-to-peer payments space. eBay Inc.’s acquisition of Braintree in late 2013 further expanded the company’s reach into the payment sharing economy. This is in part due to Braintree’s popular Venmo mobile payments solution, which experienced explosive growth across college campuses and was voted as a Top 10 App by TIME in 2014.
In eBay Inc.’s Q4 2014 conference call, eBay Inc. CEO John Donahoe explained that PayPal is also extending its credit offerings and installment payment options for both merchants and consumers, with the business recently launching solutions such as PayPal Working Capital in Australia and the UK and PayPal Credit.
Providing an outlook on PayPal’s future, Donahoe has said, “In a rapidly changing global payments environment, we believe that PayPal is positioned to leverage its global footprint, digital payments leadership and unique competitive strengths.”