“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.
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 new accounts in the first financial quarter of 2022.
