PayPal Stories Archive

 

July 20 marked the one year anniversary of PayPal as an independent company. Looking back at what we’ve accomplished together with our partners in the past year is pretty remarkable. Though we know we still have far to go, we’ve come a long way toward our goals of democratizing financial services and reimagining how people move and manage their money.

 

Since becoming an independent company, we’ve gained more focus, forged new partnerships and innovated and scaled much more quickly. We’ve been recognized as a financial and business leader. PayPal is now a Fortune 500 company and listed on both the S&P 100 and Nasdaq 100. But we’ve been recognized for more than just our financials. We were honored that this year, consumers voted us the number five ranked company in terms of brands that do the most good for the world on the Brand World Value Rankings list. As a business, we’ve been recognized on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Employers, which is important because our employees are one of our most valued assets. Finally, we made Interbrand’s list of top global brands for the first time in our 18 year history.

 

This recognition has come largely in response to our product innovation. We’ve continued to build the products that are enabling the future of commerce -- helping consumers and merchants connect securely and seamlessly at the point of discovery. And because we work with both consumers and merchants and operate agnostically by enabling our product experiences across operating systems and devices, we get to work with a growing number of customers who want the flexibility and choice PayPal offers. Today, we have 188 million active customer accounts. Since becoming an independent company, we’ve added 19 million active customer accounts.

 

In the past year, we scaled One Touch to more than 200 consumer markets -- expanding the seamless checkout experience to more than 100 countries in just one day. Today, more than 25 million consumers and more than two million merchants use or enable the service, which lets consumers who opt in, skip login when they check out without having to type in any usernames, passwords or billing information across merchants, until they turn it off. One Touch is the most rapidly adopted product PayPal has ever rolled out, and it led the way for other digital checkout experiences.

 

We also launched PayPal Commerce, enabling the coming wave of contextual commerce experiences that allow businesses to sell and consumers to buy nearly anywhere online or on mobile. Since 1998, when we helped pioneer digital payments, PayPal has been a leader in the payments revolution. We have expanded payments from online to mobile, in-store and now we’re helping to lead payments into social and other new contexts. Following on the heels of Venmo’s rapid growth, which processed more than $3.9 billion in payment volume last quarter, we launched Pay Merchants with Venmo, enabling customers to pay select businesses using Venmo. After taking customer feedback into consideration, we launched the redesigned PayPal app, and soon after launched in-app donations within the PayPal app, rolled out enhanced tools for businesses, and expanded cardless cash access across more than 2,000 locations in the US.

 

While we’ve continued to innovate internally, we have never forgotten the power and potential of partnerships. Since becoming an independent company, we’ve seen increased interest from global players to partner with PayPal, and in the past year alone, we’ve forged partnerships with some of the world’s leading brands from América Móvil to Vodafone to Visa. These partnerships have enabled us to quickly extend our product innovation and to move to a digital commerce world that delivers new experiences for our customers.

 

As we’ve been working to enable the future of commerce, we’ve been inspired by other brands that share similar goals. In the past year, we’ve brought two new brands into the PayPal family. We acquired Modest to help us more quickly drive forward our work on contextual commerce. We then acquired Xoom, which helps people send money to their loved ones across the globe faster, more securely and more affordably. As part of the PayPal family, we can bring global remittances to more people and expand Xoom’s offerings. PayPal’s digital remittance service, Xoom, expanded to additional markets, bringing the total to 50+ countries.

 

Businesses of all sizes, industries and markets are taking notice of the new PayPal. While we continue to work with next-gen innovators who constantly inspire us, in the past year we’ve begun working with leading businesses like Crate and Barrel, Dyson, FreshDirect, Panera Bread, Sephora, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Subway, Vitamix and Woolworths among many others. As these companies have been innovating to create better experiences for their customers, they are working with PayPal to be able to roll out more flexible and seamless ways to pay for their customers.

 

We’ve continued to advance our mission to democratize financial services and create a world in which everyone – individuals, businesses and nonprofits – has access to the full range of tools and resources they need to thrive. In the past year, we’ve scaled products and services that are advancing financial health for individuals, businesses and communities. PayPal Working Capital surpassed $2 billion in loans to over 90,000 small businesses. Xoom expanded into over 50 countries, allowing people to send money, pay bills and reload phones for family and friends around the world. And we’ve enabled billions of dollars in mission critical funds to charities through our giving tools and outreach to customers.

 

In addition to impact that we’ve driven through our core business, we’ve made strategic investments and developed collaborations to extend our impact even further. During the past year, we invested in Acorns, a micro-investment app which is helping to simplify and democratize investing. We also expanded collaborations with non-profit partners, Kiva and Village Capital, who are making financial services more accessible to the underserved. During the past year, our collaboration with Kiva exceeded $850 million in crowd-funded loans to over two million microbusinesses around the world. With Village Capital, we expanded our support of and involvement in their venture development programs in Latin America, the United States and India, to help train and fund fintech innovators developing solutions for the underserved.

 

PayPal is the world’s largest open, full-stack digital payments platform. Being a leader in the financial technology space comes with responsibilities. We believe that now is the time to reimagine money and democratize financial services – so that managing and moving money is a right for all citizens. We believe everyone has the right to participate fully in the global economy and we have an obligation to empower people to exercise this right. And we believe there is still so much potential to unlock globally, so we will continue building the tools and products upon which businesses can innovate. We’ve come a long way in our year as an independent company, and we’re looking forward to what’s ahead.