Today, it’s my pleasure to officially close the books on 2015 by sharing PayPal’s financial results for a very strong fourth quarter and an excellent fiscal year. It was a year in which we met or exceeded the high end of our financial guidance and exited with momentum into 2016.
For the year, we posted revenue of $9.24 billion, an increase of 19 percent*, which was above our guidance of 15-18 percent. Our total payment volume reached $282 billion, an increase of 27 percent*. Growth in both areas accelerated during the fourth quarter, with revenue up 21 percent* and total payment volume increasing to 29 percent*.
Our numbers also demonstrate the power and relevance of our payments platform to people and businesses around the world. We strengthened our lead in mobile payments. In 2015, 28% of the 5 billion transactions we processed were on mobile devices. We added 6.6 million new customers during the fourth quarter, a new record for PayPal, and we now stand at a total of 179 million active accounts, up 17 million for the year. Transactions per account grew by 12 percent in 2015, to 27.
In addition, we generated more than $1.8 billion in cash in 2015, which gives us great flexibility to pursue growth and opportunity as we move forward. The financial strength this provides underlies the announcement today that we are launching a $2 billion stock buyback program.
These numbers cap a milestone year for PayPal. In 2015, we completed our separation from eBay and celebrated the beginning of a new era as an independent company. We reengineered our technology platform so that we can innovate and deliver new experiences with dramatically greater speed. And we sharpened our commitment to provide great value to consumers and merchants through a global platform that no company can match.
Our timing couldn’t be better. This is a pivotal moment in this industry as the digitization of money and the mass adoption of mobile devices create opportunities to help our merchants transform commerce and reinvent the management and movement of money for people, everywhere.
Venmo is just one example of how our payment platform makes it easier and more engaging for people to move and manage their money. In 2015, we processed $7.5 billion in payments between people, a jump of more than 200 percent. Our momentum with Venmo is incredibly strong – $2.5 billion of that total came in the fourth quarter. As we head into 2016, we are beginning to introduce new features that enable people to use Venmo to make in-app purchases.
Xoom is another example. With the completion of our acquisition of Xoom last quarter, we’re now giving U.S. consumers the ability to send money to friends and family in more than 41 countries.
PayPal has also become an important platform for charitable giving. During the 2015 holiday season, consumers donated $857 million to more than 250,000 charities through PayPal. This unprecedented level of year-end giving was punctuated by a single-day record of $45.8 million on December 1.
To merchants, PayPal is now much more than a payment button on a website. Today, they look to us to provide a full range of payment and commerce solutions that include the capability to process all payment types from any platform and that extends across shopping experiences in stores, on the web, and on mobile devices.
One Touch is at the forefront of the transformation of commerce that PayPal is driving for consumers and merchants. More than 15 million consumers have opted-in since it launched six months ago, and they are using it to shop with more than 1 million merchants, including companies such as Bed Bath & Beyond and Sur La Table.
We’re also helping businesses succeed through PayPal Credit, which lets merchants offer flexible ways for their customers to pay; and through our PayPal Working Capital program for small and medium businesses, which provided more than $1 billion in loans to more than 50,000 U.S. businesses in 2015.
We continued to expand the universe of partners we work with to offer innovative new ways to connect people to merchants, each other, and their money in the fourth quarter as well. We announced a new strategic agreement with First Data, which is the largest U.S. in-store payment processor. We extended our relationship with Alibaba.com with a pilot that will enable vendors on Alibaba’s business-to-business site to accept PayPal payments. And we teamed up with Facebook to launch a new commerce experience for Uber within Facebook Messenger that allows people to order and pay for a ride within the popular messaging app, without ever having to leave the conversation or provide new payment information. This is an example of PayPal and Braintree using our tokenization expertise to reduce friction on mobile, increase security and provide consumers with more portability to use their payment information with more merchants.
As remarkable as 2015 was, I know it was just the foundation for greater success in 2016. We’re operating in an incredibly dynamic marketplace right now as companies from financial services, payments, technology, and other industries scramble to launch products and services.
In this rapidly evolving environment, we bring a trusted brand, a comprehensive global technology platform, industry-leading security capabilities, and a growing base of engaged customers. This puts us in a unique position to lead this change by providing unmatched value to consumers, merchants, and partners as we move forward in our quest to reimagine money and deliver the operating system for digital commerce.
*Calculated on an FX neutral basis