Earlier today,
PayPal reported financial results for our recently competed first quarter. I’m pleased to report that we started our year with a strong quarter. You can learn more about our financial results on the PayPal
web site. However, the PayPal story is bigger than our results, and our progress often can’t be communicated solely with numbers.
At PayPal, we are fully committed to democratizing financial services to make the management and movement of money as simple, accessible, secure, and affordable as possible. That’s our North Star as a comApany. So, when assessing our progress, we ask ourselves questions like: did we help merchants get closer to their customers and maximize their opportunities? Did we help consumers join and thrive in the digital economy, providing the tools they need to improve their financial health? Are we serving the underserved and filling in the gaps in the traditional financial system so that people and businesses around the world can pursue and fulfill their dreams?
These are big questions and big goals. They are not easy to achieve, but we are mission-driven and ambitious. Which brings me back to our results. Our financial and business metrics are a good benchmark for how we are doing against our overall vision. For example, in the first three months of 2017, we added 6 million net new active accounts, our largest organic quarterly increase in the past three years. The number of active merchant accounts on the PayPal platform increased to 16 million. And once again, our transactions per active account increased to 32 in the first quarter, up from 28 a year ago.
Increasingly our customers are engaging on our platform through mobile technology. In the quarter, 32% of our payment volume came through a mobile device and mobile payment volume increased to approximately $32 billion, a 51% increase over the same period last year. And, our mobile payment app Venmo processed $6.8 billion in payments in the quarter. This more than doubled the volume processed a year ago.
We also strive to offer new services to both advance our ability to democratize money and increase everyday use of the PayPal platform by our customers. In the quarter, we announced an agreement to acquire TIO Networks Corp., which will add bill payment capabilities to our network and give millions of people who lack access to digital financial services a way to easily move from the inconvenience and expense of using cash to the security and simplicity of digital payments. We are proud that TIO’s shareholders voted in favor of approving this acquisition earlier this month and expect this acquisition to close in the second half of the year, subject to certain closing conditions.
Finally, we are excited that we expanded our partnership agreements with leading companies like Google, Wells Fargo, Visa in the Asia-Pacific region, and Vodafone in Europe to give our customers greater choice when using PayPal. These partnerships make PayPal more available everywhere our customers want to shop and pay.
Our strong results come from our unwavering focus on being a customer champion. I am proud of what we achieved last quarter and I want to thank the entire team at PayPal that made it possible. It is their dedication, energy, and hard work that is enabling us to bring new value and convenience to consumers and merchants.