PayPal has reported its first quarter results for 2018 and they are not bad at all. They noted that they processed $132 billion in payments in the first quarter of 2018 and that’s up 32% on last year. The mobile payment volumes increased 52% in the three months to $49 billion. Merchant services payment volumes grew 30% and that accounts for 87% of total payment volumes for the company.
Most notably, the user base continues to grow. There are now 8 million new active users globally. That takes the total to 237 million active users around the world and is an increase of 35% year-over-year.
And PayPal’s Venmo payments business, that’s very popular with millennials, continues to prosper too. Schulman said that Venmo acquired more net new active users during Q1 than in any previous quarter it also processed $12.3 billion in payment volume and that’s up by over 80% on the same period in 2017. The monetisation of Venmo also continues to make progress.
You can read the full transcript of the PayPal earnings call and Q&A here. And the leaders there are bullish about the future:
We’re clearly transforming from a payments button to an open digital payments platform. And by doing so we’re redefining our relationship with partners, retailers and consumers in a much more expansive manner. We continue to grow our relationships with technology platforms and companies across the globe as well as with card networks and issuing banks.
– Dan Schulman. PayPal CEO
Crucially PayPal’s relationship with eBay is no longer definitive to the payments firm. eBay will be moving towards an intermediated payments system over the next few years and PayPal will be part of that mix.
The Adyen system will enable eBay to take payments from a much broader selection of providers and PayPal will be one of them. But the results this quarter show that PayPal has much greater horizons beyond its old bedfellow. As the results noted, on an FX-neutral basis the merchant services TPV (total payments volume) grew at five times the rate of the eBay marketplaces TPV.
One Response
ebay and adyen will need to pull some rabbit out of the hat
to compete with paypals entrenched position in the market place