PayPal CEO says firm to 'double down' on digital wallet efforts

Wallets • April 27, 2022, 6:35PM EDT
UPDATED: April 28, 2022, 8:06AM EDT
The Block

PayPal's CEO stressed during the company's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday that digital wallets will play a key role in the digital payment firm's future growth. 

“We need to double down on the digital wallet," PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman said during the call. "We believe that is where the future of the industry is going, it’s the future of PayPal, it is the heart of what we’re trying to do from an engagement perspective.” 

Schulman cited several statistics as the rationale: more than 50% of the PayPal base uses the company’s digital wallet, customers who use the digital wallet transact 25% more at checkout than users who don’t, and over 70% of buy now pay later (BNPL) users did it through the firm’s digital wallet.

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

In addition, according to Schulman, the digital wallet's churn rate, or the rate at which customers stop using a given service, is 25% less than the rest of the PayPal customer base. 

“Across both PayPal and Venmo, we are working hard to have our digital wallets at the center of our consumers’ daily financial lives,” Schulman said.

In January of this year, PayPal confirmed that it is also actively exploring a stablecoin, or a cryptocurrency pegged to a country’s currency like the US dollar.

Alongside its data on digital wallet usage, PayPal announced Wednesday that it earned $6.5 billion in net revenue and added 2.4 million new accounts in the first financial quarter of 2022.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.