PayPal Holdings Inc.’s push to drive more mobile transactions is paying off.
PayPal processed about $32 billion worth of transactions initiated by smartphones and tablets in the fiscal first quarter of 2017, a 51.0% year-over-year increase, the company reported this week. The payments processor said nearly a third of its payment volume came from mobile devices.
PayPal’s net revenue was $2.975 billion during the quarter, up 16.9% from $2.544 billion during the same period last year. Total payment volume was $99.327 billion, which is a 22.5% year-over-year jump from $81.056 billion.
PayPal added 6.0 million active customer accounts, ending the quarter with 203.0 million, which includes 16.0 million merchant accounts. This total is up 10.3% from 184.0 million in the first quarter of 2016.
Venmo, PayPal’s peer-to-peer payments platform, more than doubled its volume from the first quarter of 2016, reaching $6.8 billion, which represents 114.0% year-over-year growth. The social app continued to “transform” how millennials manage and engage with their money, executives said during a conference call with analysts, and there have been nearly no marketing investments behind the platform’s swift adoption rate because of its “inherently viral” nature.
PayPal says it plans to enhance users’ peer-to-peer experience in second quarter—although executives didn’t outline specifics—and will open its data for some U.S. merchants who accept Venmo as a mobile payment option. By the end of the year, the company says it expects a significant number of retailers to accept Venmo.
“Investments we have made in our platform architecture now allow us to enable Venmo as a payment method for our PayPal merchants without any additional integration work on their end,” president and CEO Dan Schulman told analysts, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha.
PayPal also recently announced that its payment platform will be an option in the Android Pay wallet for U.S. account holders to pay both in an app and at the point of sale with the millions of retailers that accept Android Pay.
PayPal is “helping drive the global transition from cash to digital payments and positioning our millions of merchants to benefit from the mobile revolution and move to an all-digital, cost-context retail environment,” Schulman said.
For the first quarter ended March 31, PayPal also reports:
- U.S. revenue of $1.606 billion, up 19.6% from $1.343 billion last year.
- Net income of $384.0 million, up 5.2% from $365.0 million last year.
- 1.732 billion payment transactions, up 22.5% from 1.414 billion last year.
- 31.7 payment transactions per active customer account—or those that sent or received at least one payment or payment reversal in the last 12 months—up 11.6% from 28.4 last year.