Digital payments pioneer PayPal is seeking to recast its business prospects with help from some big name companies.

PayPal is leaning on the likes of Facebook parent Meta for collaboration in a variety of ways, and working with major retailers such as Nordstrom to drive more purchasing, CEO Alex Chriss said during a call with analysts to discuss PayPal’s second quarter results issued Tuesday.

Chriss, who became CEO last year after the exit of longtime-leader Dan Schulman, has been seeking to revive profitable growth on the two-sided payments network. To that end, he has hired new top managers and rolled out several new strategies earlier this year to better serve PayPal’s consumer and merchant account customers.

Chriss pointed to the social media giant Meta as one example of how San Jose, California-based PayPal is gaining traction with big tech companies to improve business in what has been billed as a transition year. While the relationship with Meta isn’t new, it has grown, Chriss noted.

Specifically, PayPal is used on Meta’s apps for payments both by advertisers as well as consumers as well as for charitable giving through the social media site. Meta also uses PayPal’s digital wallet to make payments to creators and software developers. Finally, Meta also uses PayPal’s Braintree services for credit card processing, he said.

“The value of our platform is being recognized by large tech companies that are seeking to partner with us in a variety of new ways,” Chriss told analysts, suggesting more such ties are in the offing in “coming quarters.”

Meanwhile, PayPal also started offering in-app promotions during the quarter via major retailers including Nordstrom as well as Walmart, Instacart, BestBuy, Ticketmaster and Priceline.

Those partnerships helped lift PayPal’s second-quarter net income 10% to $1.13 billion, as revenue climbed 8% to $7.89 billion, according to the company’s earnings release Tuesday.

“We are still early in our transformation, and while pleased with our progress in many areas, we know there is much more we can do and with greater speed,” Chriss acknowledged on the call, citing the need for improvements specifically in delivering via mobile devices; with respect to small and mid-sized businesses; and related to its peer-to-peer tool Venmo.

While the company’s number of active accounts, including merchants and consumer users, dropped slightly to 429 million accounts compared to the year-earlier quarter, the number increased by the same slight percentage, less than one percent, compared to the first quarter. The year-over-year decrease was due partly to the company jettisoning “low-quality accounts,” a PayPal spokesperson said by email.

The company’s unbranded business, via its Braintree unit, has been growing at a fast clip over the past couple years, but at a lower margin. The company’s new management has been trying to increase Braintree margins, with Chriss taking up the effort and making headway this quarter, he told analysts on the call. “Braintree is now meaningfully contributing to transaction margin dollar growth for the first time in over two years,” he said on the call.

While PayPal management anticipates its newfound momentum to continue in the second half of the year, and raised its financial outcome expectations as a result, it also expects increased marketing dollars to eat into gains.

In the second half of the year, there will be “a much bigger ramp in our marketing spend” for “brand campaigns for both PayPal and Venmo,” said PayPal Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller, who also joined the company last year. The company will be “making sure we put our marketing dollars to work.”

Some of the new initiatives that spending will support will include PayPal’s new Fastlane services. That’s a new effort from Chriss to help retailer clients to gain a better understanding of their customers that choose to pay with a “guest” check-out process in an attempt to allow retailers to tap data on those shoppers and better engage with them.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Daniel Perlin was positive about PayPal’s new efforts demonstrated in the second-quarter report. The results increased his team's "conviction that management is making tangible progress repositioning the company to drive profitable, durable growth," he said in a Tuesday report to the investment firm’s clients.

Specifically, Perlin cited payments volume for PayPal's branded checkout rising 6% over the year-ago quarter; its transaction margin dollars climbing 8%; and Braintree growth contributing to profits.

By Lynne Marek on July 30, 2024
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