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Q1 2025 PayPal Holdings Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Steven Winoker; Chief Investor Relations Officer; PayPal Holdings Inc

Alex Chriss; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; PayPal Holdings Inc

Jamie Miller; Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President; PayPal Holdings Inc

Tien-tsin Huang; Analyst; JP Morgan

Dan Dolev; Analyst; Mizuho Securities

Ramsey El Assal; Anlayst; Barclays

Darrin Peller; Analyst; Wolfe Research

Jason Kupferberg; Analyst; Bank of America

Andrew Schmidt; Analyst; Citi

Harshita Rawat; Analyst; AB Bernstein

Sanjay Sakhrani; Analyst; KBW

Timothy Chiodo; Analyst; UBS

Dan Perlin; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets, LLC

Will Nance; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Presentation

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to PayPal's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Paulie, and I will be your conference operator today. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the program over to your host for today's conference, Steve Winoker, PayPal's Chief Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Steven Winoker

Thanks, Paulie. Welcome to PayPal's first quarter earnings call. I'm joined by CEO, Alex Chriss; and Chief Financial and Operating Officer, Jamie Miller.
Our remarks today include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. Our commentary is based on our best view of the world and our bids as we see them today.
As described in our earnings press release, SEC filings and on our website, those elements may change as the world changes.
Now over to you, Alex.

Alex Chriss

Thanks, Steve. We had a strong first quarter as we begin to execute on the strategy we laid out during our recent Investor Day. PayPal is transforming from a payments company to a commerce platform. This includes expanding to be available everywhere, whether it's online, in-store or agentic. This means moving from a one-size-fits-all experience to personalized experiences that leverage the vast data at our fingertips.
We are developing a dynamic smart wallet that will allow consumers to make the smart choice in how to pay and get rewarded. With this transformation, we are shifting from being purely a payments processor to an end-to-end strategic commerce partner for our merchants.
And underpinning this is our work to converge into a single PayPal platform that unlocks the full potential of PayPal's two-sided network in support of both consumers and merchants. This strategy -- and positions us to win in the months and years ahead.
Turning to Q1. We have so much to be proud of. Let me share just a few highlights. Our strategy is designed to improve PayPal's profitability over time. In Q1, we delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of profitable growth, with transaction margin dollars growing by 8%, excluding the impact from last year's leap day.
That growth was driven by multiple sources across our strategic initiatives, including omnichannel commerce, both online branded checkout and off-line branded payment methods, Venmo and PSP.
As a result of this focus on profitability, non-GAAP earnings per share increased 23% year-over-year. Additionally, PayPal and Venmo are being used by more people, more often. Both total active accounts and monthly active accounts grew a healthy 2% in the quarter. Transactions per active account ex PSP grew 4%, reflecting improved engagement and transaction growth in online branded checkout and Venmo.
As we expand our offerings from online to everywhere, the best way to see the traction we're gaining is through branded experiences TPV. Branded experiences comprises volume from PayPal and Venmo online checkout, as well as branded in-store payment methods like debit and Tap to Pay.
In Q1, branded experiences TPV grew 8%, excluding last year's leap day. That's a full 2 points higher than branded experiences' growth for the full year of 2024, highlighting the growing contribution of our omnichannel initiatives. It's still early days, but we are very proud of this progress.
Within branded experiences, we're continuing to accelerate the rollout of our upgraded online branded checkout flows. This includes our simplified and modernized pay sheet design, with streamlined log-in reduced latency. Since the beginning of the year, we've driven a 25-point jump to more than 45% of US checkout traffic.
This shows we can execute, and we anticipate an even faster rollout for Europe starting in the second quarter. And finally, Venmo had another standout quarter. We hit an important inflection point for Venmo monetization, 20% revenue growth, driven by our push to make Venmo one of the best ways to pay online and in-store.
These are only a few examples of the strength we're seeing in the execution of our strategy. We're feeling the excitement of our innovations in the market and the engagement from our consumers and merchant partners, and we're just getting started.
As you can hear, I'm encouraged by the momentum we are driving. We had a great start to the year and expect a solid second quarter, which would result in the first half coming in above our prior expectations. However, given it is early in the year and because of the current level of macro uncertainty, we are maintaining our guidance for the full year at this time. Jamie will provide more color on our results and guidance in her remarks.
Let me now go into the details of the progress we're making on our strategic growth drivers. Starting with win checkout. Online branded checkout TPV, including PayPal and Pay with Venmo, grew nearly 6% this quarter, accounting for last year's leap day. We're proud of this growth and expect it to increase over time as more traffic flows through our upgraded experience.
One of the main benefits of our upgraded experience is the modernized pay sheet, which improves the presentment of our full suite of payment options. This contributes to a personalized experience where consumers can more easily pay their own way, whether balance, cards, crypto or buy now pay later.
What we're seeing is that as we improve the presentment of BNPL and checkout, it's being selected more often. In Q1, the BNPL volume grew more than 20% and monthly active accounts grew 18% year-over-year, highlighting the effectiveness of the new design and the strength of our value proposition. As a reminder, BNPL users spend 33% more on average and conduct 17% more transactions.
BNPL is featured in our latest marketing efforts with Will Ferrell about PayPal's flexible online checkout, and we are focused on winning in key markets. We will continue to lean into BNPL throughout this year with consumer awareness campaigns in the UK and Germany, and continued investment in other priority global markets, including Australia, France, Italy and Spain.
Pay with Venmo is resonating well with consumers and merchants, and it's growing rapidly with TPV increasing more than 50%. Monthly active accounts grew [30%] as we increased merchant availability. First of all, in January, JetBlue became the first airline to accept Venmo for bookings.
We're seeing strong selection from Venmo's valuable demographic with brands such as Domino's, Instacart and TikTok shop. I expect more demographic relevant merchants to offer Pay with Venmo over the coming quarters.
Let's move to the progress we are making to become omnichannel, serving our customers everywhere they want to shop with PayPal and Venmo. As noted earlier, branded experiences' TPV grew 8% in the quarter, excluding last year's leap day. This growth reflects our strategy to deliver flexible and rewarding experiences that consumers to do the things and experiences they want and love wherever they shop.
Today, our PayPal and Venmo debit cards are enabling our customers to use their balance to shop anywhere cards are accepted. Adoption is strong and growing, with approximately 2 million first-time PayPal and Venmo debit card users in the quarter, an increase of nearly 90% from last year.
Debit card TPV grew approximately 64% in the first quarter. Venmo debit card monthly active accounts grew nearly 40% and penetration has reached to 6% of Venmo MAAs.
We are focused on getting these products into the hands of even more of our customers because they allow them to choose PayPal and Venmo as their way to pay more often. In the first quarter, users who adopted the PayPal debit card transacted nearly 6 times more and generated more than 2 times the average revenue per account, compared to those who used on branded checkout only.
There is also a halo effect where debit card users choose PayPal more often in online branded checkout. Our omnichannel strategy is showing early success in the US, and we are excited to roll it out internationally. We are on track to launch NFC capabilities in Germany later this quarter and bring PayPal everywhere to the UK in Q3.
Moving to our PSP business, which remains a key driver of transaction margin dollar growth. We continue to build deeper relationships with the world's largest brands and sell our strong suite of value-added services. That is a massive untapped and margin-rich opportunity. I'll share two examples.
We recently scaled our optimized debit routing with Wayfair and Upwork. This service routes eligible debit cards through lower-cost debit networks, which helps merchants reduce their transaction fees. Regal Cinemas has adopted our Fraud Protection Advanced Service, which allows merchants to leverage PayPal's decades of fraud intelligence and machine learning to improve their risk decisions and capture even more revenue.
Let me give you an example of how this focus on adoption of value-added services can improve end-to-end relationship and margin profile of our largest customers. Recently, we expanded our relationship with a long-time Braintree merchant. By focusing on price to value and processing, acumen of advanced risk capabilities and leading-edge brand dilutions, like payment-ready API, we were able to improve merchant performance and profitability.
We took this merchant from unprofitable to profitable, improving their transaction margin nearly 20-percentage-points over the course of a year. These are the kinds of conversations we're having that drive value for our customers and for PayPal. Because of the quality of our value-added services, we expect these types of improvements to continue over the next few years.
For small businesses, we continue to migrate volume on to PayPal Complete payments. Today, nearly half of SMB processing and checkout volume is on this platform, which is steady progress from last quarter. Bringing more SMBs into the stack enables them to easily access our latest online branded checkout and new products like Fastlane, and we've seen incremental product adoption increase by 33% as a result.
Next, PayPal has laying our two-sided ecosystem in ways we've never seen before to innovate and build the future of commerce. Whether it's AI, personalization, ads or crypto we are providing our customers with the most advanced ways to engage in a shopping experience. These initiatives are in the early stages but unlock significant growth potential for us in the years ahead.
Take AI for instance. At Investor Day, I told you we were leaning into agentic commerce. I asked you to imagine what a future would look like, where AI agents could bring up the right products at the right time and complete your purchase. Thanks to rapid developments, that future is here.
Just a few weeks ago, we launched the industry's first remote MCP server and enabled the leading AI agent frameworks to seamlessly integrate with PayPal APIs. Now any business can create agentic experience that allow customers to pay, track shipments, manage invoices and more, all powered by PayPal and all within an AI client.
As we speak, developers are gathering in our San Jose headquarters for our annual developer days. Every major player in AI is represented, providing demos and engaging with our developer community. The future of commerce will have a strong agentic presence, and we're excited about leading the charge.
PayPal Ads is continuing to lay the foundation for a robust and highly differentiated ads business that will create more personalized shopping experiences. We're leveraging our extensive cross-merchant transaction data and customer insights to develop a platform that improves discovery for consumers and helps merchants reach more shoppers.
We recently expanded PayPal Ads internationally with our launch in the UK. And today, we are launching offsite ads, which are ads informed by our insights placed outside of the PayPal platform. This will allow PayPal to help brands find the right user at the right time, and it is built with the privacy in mind.
We are working to rapidly accelerate advertiser onboarding as we continue to grow. Crypto is another area we're making strides. We're moving quickly to bring the benefits of crypto and stable coins to our customers and the industry. Last week, we introduced the ability to earn rewards for holding PYUSD. This will increase the option and use of digital currencies for everyday commerce, from sending money internationally to making purchases and more.
We've also strengthened our relations with major crypto players, like Coinbase, so people can more easily access and use PYUSD. As I close my remarks, I want to again highlight how proud I am of our team and the focused execution and innovation we are driving. To reinforce this point, let me bring together Venmo's strength in the first quarter as an example.
We've leaned into Venmo and the investment is starting to pay off. The Venmo user base continued to expand, and we're growing monthly active accounts mid-single digits. Pay with Venmo TPV grew more than 50% and MAAs grew 30%. Venmo debit card MAAs grew nearly 40% and penetration has increased to 6% of Venmo MAAs. That's up from 4% a year ago.
When you add it all up, the Venmo business, grew revenue 20%. That sequential double-digit growth are the highest rate we've achieved in years. Our execution muscle is growing stronger by the day, and we're just getting started.
To recap, we had a great first quarter. We are confident in our ability to execute the strategy we laid out as we entered the year. With our clear strategy, strong balance sheet, high free cash flow conversion, and traction and execution, we have a solid foundation that allows us to navigate uncertain times and invest in our long-term growth.
With that, over to Jamie.