PayPal at Financial Technology Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, PayPal Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) presented at the Financial Technology Conference, offering a strategic overview of its operations and future plans. The discussion highlighted PayPal’s expansive growth and innovation, with a focus on market expansion, talent acquisition, and technological advancements. Despite challenges in restructuring, PayPal demonstrated robust momentum in key areas such as Venmo and omnichannel experiences.

Key Takeaways

• PayPal is experiencing high double-digit growth in Venmo, with a 4% increase in new accounts.
• Omnichannel total payment volume (TPV) growth exceeds 100%, indicating strong offline performance.
• PayPal’s merchant acquisition pipelines have quadrupled for large enterprises and doubled for small businesses.
• The company aims for 80% of branded checkout experiences to feature new integrations by 2027.
• Agentic commerce is projected to account for 30% or more of global commerce, with PayPal positioned to capitalize on this trend.

Financial Results

• Venmo:

- Very high double-digit growth

- New accounts increased by 4%

- Average revenue per account rose by 12%

• Omnichannel:

- Offline TPV growth over 100%

• Merchant Side:

- Pay with Venmo increased by 50%

- Monthly active accounts grew by 30%

• New Enterprise Wins:

- Pipelines expanded fourfold

• New Small Business Wins:

- Pipelines doubled

• Braintree:

- Transitioning to profitable growth, with top-line revenue growth expected by year-end

Operational Updates

• Go-to-Market Strategy:

- 100% coverage on the largest merchant base and commerce platforms

- Small business coverage at approximately 80%

- Teams organized around verticals such as marketplaces, quick-service restaurants (QSR), and travel

• Branded Checkout:

- Over 45% of volume on modern experiences in the US

- Expansion in Germany and the UK, with faster European expansion anticipated

• Braintree:

- Strong demand in the US, Australia, and Latin America

- Focus on platform resiliency and value-added services like foreign exchange and multi-currency payouts

• Agentic Commerce:

- Launched Agentic Toolkit for developers

- Partnerships with SelfBook and Perplexity

• New Office:

- Opened in the Middle East and Africa

Future Outlook

• Branded Checkout:

- Targeting 80% of experiences on new integrations by 2027

• Omnichannel:

- Significant potential as capabilities expand

• Crypto:

- Anticipates changes in cross-border payments with crypto and stablecoin integration

• Agentic Commerce:

- Expected to become a major player, potentially accounting for 30% or more of global commerce

Q&A Highlights

• Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, emphasized PayPal’s commitment to innovation and market leadership.
• The company is focused on customer identity and resolving commerce-related issues like disputes and chargebacks.
• PayPal’s unique data and identity assets position it to leverage agentic commerce effectively.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Financial Technology Conference:

Dan: This is the part of our doubleheader today. Thank you so much for, for, allowing us to make a quick transition because I think it’s so worth it to have, another fantastic executive like Susan Carreery, who’s the president of global markets at PayPal, be able to share what’s happening at this, organization now. Lots of change Lots of change. Transformation. You have this title of president of global markets, and so that means a lot of things, to a lot of people.

So what I thought we could start with for kind of level setting purposes is what does that represent, at the organization? What rolls up underneath your responsibilities? And then how do you think about, like, the strategic, positioning that you’re gonna go forward with?

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah. Thanks. Listen, Dan. of all, thanks for having me. Good afternoon to all of the folks in the room and those on the webcast.

I must say navigating traffic from Downtown East West Side to East Side, East Side uptown, and then across to the middle in the middle of the rain was perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in the last year. So it makes transformation quite easy.

Dan: Okay.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Alright. But to answer your question more directly, so I lead PayPal’s business in the market. I am lucky enough to have a very capable leadership team that covers the business across regions. So we have people who cover the business across The Americas, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, China, and then a very able group of country managers. All of them are recently new.

We have a whole new way of working, which we’ll get into, I hope. Mhmm. We have three core responsibilities. We own the relationship with customers, large and small. We are responsible to ensure that the end to end value proposition, the way we match customer needs to PayPal solutions comes together really well.

And we are at the core of how we think about building and developing our markets for growth. Some quick stats, which I always love to share. We do business in over 200 markets. We have a team of 7,000 plus, professionals who both serve customers across account management, sales, country management, customer servicing organization, and, we are in growth mode.

Dan: No doubt. There’s no doubt you’re in growth mode. So you’ve been in the role, I think, eighteen months Yes. Thereabouts. Yep.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Not that I’m counting, but, yes,

Dan: it’s eighteen months. Fair enough. Fair enough. We’ll we’ll keep the counter rolling. So the question is very high level.

In that eighteen month period and there’s a lot of other changes that are happening at the organization that you’re gonna you’re gonna see through your lens. What are some of those tangible things that you might kind of tease out for us as an outsider looking in that we maybe are not so acute to seeing?

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: You know, look, it’s literally eighteen months ago I joined. It’s been one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my career. I’ve I’ve done many things over my career, but this is perhaps one of the big highlights. I joined early, in this phase. Alex had been on board about six months, and the leadership team around him, a terrific set of colleagues, had joined a few months before I did.

I spent the few months doing what, I think great executives do, listening, listening a ton to employees, listening a ton to customers. I heard many things, many good things. Some of the good things I heard is that customers chose to do business with us because we were global. We had an enviable set of assets. We were trusted.

This is an important thing because you think about our business, it’s highly cross border centric, and many of them were pushing to do more. But many of the buts were around gaps they saw. And to be fair, I heard a number of these gaps from some of our employees as well. Gap one was they were concerned that they were seeing innovation, but not enough of it in markets that mattered to them. Mhmm.

They were concerned about our pace and agility. They didn’t think we were moving fast enough. Some of them were turning to others for new omnichannel use cases because they were concerned we weren’t pushing on the edges of innovation. And, candidly, many of them were looking for partners who could help them grow, and they weren’t sure they could do that with us. So much of that feedback informed a lot of the things we’re doing now as a company.

That feedback informed the way we thought about talent. If you look at the portfolio of people who’ve come into the company over the last, call it, eighteen months, those people have come in with new skill sets, omnichannel. This was a big thing for us. Mhmm. Web three skills.

We have a great new head of AI who brings an enormous body of data scientists with him, new ways of thinking about consumer value proposition. So talent was a big thing. We brought in lots of great talent, but we also brought in people who understood how business was done in local markets. We just opened up an office in The Middle East and Africa, and we have people now who actually know how business gets done on the ground in those markets. So talent was a big thing.

We changed organization, and this again was we wanted to be an organization that was faster moving. To be faster moving, you need to do a few things. You have to do things that are more standard. You have to be much more transparent. You have to empower the organization.

And so we built a structure that drove empowerment into the ranks of our teams, and that empowerment was much more is much more decentralized now, particularly as we have a country structure that allows teams that are cross functional to work together to benefit how we serve customers on the ground. We changed the pace of innovation. We will talk, I know, more a little bit more about that. And so all of the things you see on our road map, that clarity of what we were going to prioritize to do and the clarity of what we were not going to do was important. So the things we’ve done to modernize experiences where we’re going with omnichannel, the push into consumer value props, the changes we’re making to the merchant flywheel, all of that clarity was driven through the organization at scale.

And then I think this is one of the biggest things I give Alex credit for aside from his just geniusness and product centricity is that he really changed the culture. Mhmm. It is more open, more transparent, more urgent, more focused, more customer back. And, you know, quite honestly, when you listen to our employees now, people say things like, we’re playing to win. Mhmm.

This is our moment. We intend to make the best of it.

Dan: Yeah. I think that you definitely can start to see that externally. I mean, saw it at the Analyst Day that you guys just hosted. I think that came out as the personality of the organization has changed. And I think that that that was, I think that definitely came to the forefront.

One

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: of

Dan: the things, though, that is kind of a blocking and tackling, and you talked about this with local market, going after local market, is the really the the go to market motion that has changed

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah.

Dan: Today relative to the prior strategy. So maybe if you could put a finer point on that. Yeah. And then what the intended outcomes of that change, ultimately you’re looking for.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: So, listen. If you go back to, like, the listening tour Mhmm. On the go to market side, the things that really stuck with me because they were so consistent country to country, whether you were in The US, across Europe, in Asia, was, you know, customers said, look, guys. We think there’s an opportunity here to grow together, but you don’t seem to be engaged. We don’t have clarity that you feel as urgent as we do about the growth options in front of us.

So clarity, sense

Dan: of

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: urgency. There was this missing bit. They said we weren’t covering them enough. There was no one engaged with them day to day. They also said, like, we don’t know how to think about your brand.

Do we understand the payments component, the button component, but we’re looking for a growth partner. So how do we engage with you to translate how you can help us grow our businesses? And then they said, we see now a lot more news about innovation, but it’s not clear to us that that innovation is about helping our businesses grow. So those were some of the principles that we set to work on as we thought about go to market. So principle one was we had to get to a 100% coverage of all of our Yeah.

Customers, largest largest merchant partners, largest commerce platforms, and the long tail of small business. We had to get to a point where we could engage with customers on an ongoing daily basis. We had to meet merchants where they were. Merchants were doing business with us in 200 markets around the world, and we needed to be much more local Yeah. In our presence or at a minimum be in places where we could execute regionally on behalf of many markets simultaneously.

We needed to organize ourselves in ways that were quite consistent with the types of businesses we were serving. We were serving marketplaces. We were serving QSR companies. We were serving travel companies, and we had to start speaking like them to understand their needs so that we could shape the products and services that were important to them. And last but not least, going back to innovation, we needed to ensure that the things we were building and prioritizing were the things that mattered to growth because it’s it’s it’s it’s a flywheel.

Do the things that customers love. Do the things that matter to growth. Those things eventually return to benefit us as well. And so that’s what we set out to do. We have now a 100% coverage on our largest merchant base and largest commerce plat platforms for small business.

We’re at about 80% of the way there. We have organized our teams across product engineering and the way we go to market with our sales and account management teams around verticals so that we have vertical focused teams that can go to market together and serve the customer end to end. And then as you think about solutioning, the way we commercialize the business is designed around the things that generate the greatest value to the customer so that we’re debating value and value creation and not debating basis points.

Dan: So along that same vein with all this change taking place, kind of like children, we love them all, but there are some that maybe stand out. So the parts of the world where you’re gaining momentum, with all of this change taking place, obviously, the goal is to have all of them moving in the right direction. But maybe you could showcase just a few where you’ve seen real momentum in a commerce capacity.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah. I love starting with the KPIs, and I know we shared a few of these at, latest earnings, and we did a little bit of this at Investor Day. And you cover us well, Dan, so you know the business probably just as well as I Oh,

Dan: I I doubt that very seriously.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: But banjo. I do appreciate

Dan: the compliment. I’ll tell you.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: No. It’s it’s it’s true. So on the consumer side, I mean, I really love the momentum we’re seeing, on Venmo. I mean, Venmo is up, in the very high double digits, and we’re seeing growth on new accounts up 4%. We’re seeing growth in average revenue per account up 12%.

I love what we’re seeing on omnichannel. Omnichannel is proving to be a truly relevant part of the consumer flywheel, And I love the fact that we’re seeing TPV growth over a 100% offline and in omni, but also just starting to see habituation payback into the ecommerce flywheel. And if you look at some of the key metrics on the merchant side, pay with Venmo up 50%, which is enormous. The, monthly active accounts up 30%, which is in itself just mind boggling because this is an established product that, frankly, we just weren’t thinking about in a differential way to drive, the core consumer flywheel, but also now to drive merchant engagement because it brings in a new constituent, just a younger demography. And if you look at overall on the merchant side and look at new starts or restarts in the business, on the large enterprise size, we’re seeing our pipelines up, new wins up four times, and on the small business side, up two times.

Yeah. That is a lot of velocity. And, like, if you just anchor that to two use cases that I think tell that really well, you take a customer like Taco Bell. They are a newer, much larger relationship. You know Taco Bell well.

They have 8,000 locations growing fast in The US, continuing to grow internationally. We have now enabled pay PayPal and Venmo in their digital experiences, so that’s in app, on mobile, and on web. They signed up with us for some of the obvious reasons, right, acceptance. They signed up with us with Venmo because they wanted to target a much younger demography. They signed up with us because they want to continue to grow and engage customers, and they wanted to connect rewards and loyalty, their rewards and loyalty with our rewards and loyalty to make the experience more meaningful, richer, for consumers as they engage with them in their experiences.

They’re signing up with us because they wanna have new conversations on AgenTik and think differently about how to solve the needs of the customer base they serve. So that’s an example of, wow, it’s not just about payments, but it’s about the entire commerce flywheel. If you take another example, which we announced, just, last week, we went to market with NFC, in Germany. It’s a big time. Thank you so much.

I mean, the credit goes to a multitude of people across the company, but big credit to my colleague Diego who leads the consumer business at the company. So what Germany’s done is launched our wallet experience in in a mobile device. The largest sort of fun parts about this journey is even before we went public with any advertising, any announcements, we had a million new sign ups for the Wallet experience, and we’ve had massive uptake with merchants, large merchants like Obi and Dykeman, who have turned on rewards and loyalty to be engaged in these experiences, and they’re offering cash back to customers who choose to use PayPal in store, to reward them for their behavior. So this is a but, you know, we’ve seen elements of this as we launched with PayPal everywhere here in The US. So a million new sign ups, and we’re only just getting started.

And you think about how habits are driven. This is yet another example of how we’re executing differently, but also bringing to bear, the value proposition and the way in which our flywheels come to life on both the consumer and merchant side.

Dan: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. When we talk with our European clients, right, they’re living and breathing in those countries. And so we can we can kind of see some of those things coming to life. Germany was one of those examples that you just mentioned.

So it’s, it definitely

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: I I invite everyone who is either living in and or about to go to Germany to check us out in store because it’s an incredible experience. Just tap your way through it and and give us feedback. Please give the feedback to Steve, my colleague, but we will take all feedback.

Dan: We can feedback and the gift cards that you’re gonna supply I mean digital credential.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Listen. We’ll

Dan: we’ll get a code for you by the end the day. Feedback is a gift.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Feedback is a gift.

Dan: Okay. Okay. That’s fantastic. So let’s talk about something that’s always top of mind. It’s, it is the conversation piece at PayPal for clients, and it’s branded adoption.

Right? Like, there’s a lot of amazing changes happen, but the organization is like, we have, what we’re building, here’s our future. This is kind of a big part of what we have. Yeah. And so maybe talk to, where the branded adoption curve sits today in terms of percentage or however you would like to describe it, then what the long term ambitions are in order to achieve those kinds of goals that you have set for yourself.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah. So just to set the scene for folks, like, there is no single priority at the company that is getting more attention than the work we are doing to reinvent the way branded checkout works at PayPal. It is a an important component of the journey to commerce, and it is multifaceted. So if you start at the top, the progress we’ve made on the product side to simplify the experience, modernize the experience, to reduce friction

Dan: Mhmm.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: And latency, and to change the way we present products and experiences that matter to consumers, like the ability to pay later. Those are just a few of the headlines of the work we’ve done. And the modernization of the pay sheet is probably the single biggest catalyst of what drives how quickly we reinvent branded experiences at the company. In The US, we’re at over 45% of the volume now on modern experiences, and that is continuing to scale. We are live now in Germany and in The UK, and our confidence that we can move faster in Europe is pretty high because more than half of our European volume is already on new integrations.

We are moving fast and learning a ton as we engage with merchants directly, and we’ve built playbooks now that work across verticals because we now have a deeper understanding of what it takes to convert merchants at pace and how to make that merchant conversion journey much easier. And we continue to stand by the commitment we made to get to 80% of our experiences on new integrations by 2027. We’re doing a bunch of stuff to improve authentication. And if you step back from it all and look at sort of what is that journey on branded, I mean, what’s really amazing is all the things that are happening around the branded experience. It’s everything I said earlier about where we are with Venmo and paying with Venmo.

It’s all about loyalty and rewards. It’s the things we’re doing to enhance the merchant journey and to improve experience, to reduce friction, and to bring all the assets together, whether it is assets today like crypto and stablecoin or the journey we’re on as we get into agentic commerce.

Dan: Yeah. It’s amazing, the, the process that’s that’s taken place. When we think about the reset on Braintree and the evolution that we’ve seen there, there does seem to be some differences in terms of how The US versus Germany versus UK as examples are kind of evolving. And so maybe you could speak to some of those those points from your lens.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah. Sure. I mean, look, the you know, again, as I look at the journey on unbranded, the demand for Braintree has never been stronger. I mean, quite honestly, never been stronger. The progress we’re making and, again, here, a set of talented players that have come into the organization over the last, twelve to eighteen months.

But the changes we’re making on, the platform, resiliency, the scale, the way in which we’re integrating our value added services, like foreign exchange, multicurrency payouts, all of those things continue to progress quite well. And if you look at our progress at the market level, of course, great success here in The US. We just launched recently in Australia. We’re continuing to show strong progress across Latin America. So across the board, geographically, the demand and performance, very strong.

If you look more closely at sort of the central question behind Braintree, the largest central question around Braintree historically has been that on profitability and, price to value. And, you know, I would say candidly as one of the folks in front of that, change at the company that that has been an important change for us to make, and and we feel good about where we are. We are tracking ahead of many of the conversations we started with customers and partners around the world. We have made great progress on turning to profitable growth from unprofitable growth just over a year ago, and we are on track to inflect top line revenue growth towards the end of this year. And, you know, there are many great examples of how this is coming to life through the relationships we have with customers.

And Meta is one of the few that we talked about at InvestedIn, one of the relationships that we hold central because they’ve been such a great partner of ours over the years. They have been with us many years. The relationship with them has grown across markets and regions. The way we do business with them has changed fundamentally. They are doing more with services like payouts, doing more with us on foreign exchange, helping us jointly think differently about how to build services that work at scale with enterprises like them.

And they are using the strength of that relationship to extend the portfolio of business we do with them both on the brand unbranded and the branded side. That is exactly the the type of business we want to do in the future, and there are many great examples like that Yeah. Across the company.

Dan: Yep. Yep. So we have to talk about AI. And in particular,

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: it’s How many times have you talked about?

Dan: Yeah. It just feels it’s a it’s a necessary, topic. So Agenta Commerce and the role that it plays within your organization. Again, it feels like you have just an enormous data asset. This gives you a huge runway from which to potentially create really fantastic value for your clients, but it’s still super early days.

And so we’re all still trying to figure out, like, what role are you going to play in a world that seems like it’s moving incredibly fast.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Yeah. I mean, I think I’ll start where you started, which is, you know, you agentic commerce is a mass massive unlock. These agents are changing the way consumers literally do everything from shopping to traveling to just living life on a daily basis. I use multiple agents myself personally. Right?

From ChatGPT to Perplexity, I I I probably use them to say, what should I do with my husband today? Like, I’m running out of, like, really cool ideas for what I should get him for Father’s Day. So I assure you, have checked all three to say, this guy has everything, so now what? Like, what is the next frontier for our life together, my hubby and my wife and my husband, rather? And I no longer have to ask my kids about what should we get, dad.

But the reality is we have an incredible right to play, but also an incredible right to win. You know, you start at the fundamental with data and identity. Knowing who the customer is, whether that’s a consumer or merchant, is at the core of how agentic commerce will be shaped and will scale over time. Understanding not just what happens when commerce goes well, but how how to intervene when things go wrong. So how do you handle disputes and chargebacks?

What will you do with refunds? What’s the experience to do that? How will agents be trained on that, and who has the kind of scale of data and knowledge to not just arbitrate good commerce, safe commerce, secure commerce, but arbitrate the stuff that just happens in life, the stuff that goes wrong. We’ve been quite deliberate about our path on this, and we started pretty early. We wanted to be out so we started early with infrastructure.

And so the launch of the MCP in financial services was by us, and part of that was enabling the infrastructure that agents need to interact with PayPal. We then proceeded to, launch, the agentic toolkit, And this was all about appealing to developers and giving them the tools they need to do the jobs that happen across, PayPal PayPal’s experiences. So everything from access to the catalog, order management, the way you do refunds, the way you do reporting, the things you do with disputes, chargebacks. We’re still early in building out all of those tools, but those are the tools you need to enable if you’re going to have a kind of interaction that ends in conversational commerce. And then the pillar or the leg of this tool was all about partnerships.

And this is where just yesterday we announced a new relationship with SelfBook. That is the agent that enables search and discovery for travel experiences. A week or so ago, we announced a new partnership with Perplexity, and that relationship is also about how we enable conversational commerce to occur. And so we are looking at different things we do across all of those three pillars. It’s very early, but we feel pretty good about both our positioning but also the rate we have to participate.

And, you know, if I could say one more thing here, it’s that look. Commerce on a day to day basis is still pretty complex even with the modernization of experiences, even with agentic tools. And for most merchants, if you sit in the shoes that I sit in, the thing that most people want to do when they do businesses with us is keep it simple. Make sure it works all the time. Make sure it gives us as many of the benefits and give us a one stop one stop interaction to all the assets.

And so we think we’re in a position to bring as many agents to the center and create as many use cases and as many experiences that these merchants will need in the future. And that’s the job we’re setting out to do.

Dan: Yeah. So in the last few, seconds that we have here, kinda open mic. You know, the next three to five years, how do you look out? And and what are the things that you think are gonna play most prominently, within the organization as you kind of perpetuate this growth trajectory? And, any big bets that we think you you need to make in order to achieve those?

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: Gosh. I mean, just navigating the journey from downtown to uptown, I was thinking, like, how am I gonna do this from uptown to downtown? So I You were just taking that

Dan: that very moment. You you thought you were done.

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: I thought I was done. Sorry. Let me try and be more strategic then and say, look. I I am super stoked about everything at PayPal. And I’m stoked because, like, we have an enviable set of assets.

I mean, we are lucky to be the generation now that gets to carry the company hopefully forward for the next several decades. We have a bevy of customers, 430,000,000 plus consumers and merchants on the platform. We have a breadth scale reach globally that is enviable and takes years, decades to build. We have a brand that people trust, and we it’s not just trust because we are a big brand, but trust because in every interaction, every day, we earn the right to be trusted for many days forward. You combine that with the changes we’re making to modernize experience, accelerate innovation into new spaces like AgenTik, that stuff we’ve done now to integrate the way, crypto and stablecoin work, and our changes in go to market.

I mean, this is what drives deep conviction in how we will grow the business for the next several decades. But as I look out at sort of the long threads to pull, long thread one to pull is that on NFC, we’re at, like, dot zero on where we go with omnichannel, dot zero on a massive town. A long thread to pull number two is where we go with crypto. I mean, this is just the beginning. I am just as excited about the ability to turn on payments as I am about everything we’re doing on supply chain within and outside of the wallet, because it is cheaper, faster, and over time, it will change the way cross border payments and money moves, around around the world.

And then long thread to pull three is agentic. I mean, a dot zero on the town. That town, they say, could be as big as 30% or more of commerce around the world, and we’re going to be right there when it happens. What’s not to love? Yeah.

And I get to play an important part alongside my colleagues with a superb CEO at a company and a brand that I have followed literally all my life. And my kids say thanks very much because without Venmo, most of my kids wouldn’t have made it through school. Yeah. So that’s the strategy

Dan: Well, that’s

Susan Carreery, President of Global Markets, PayPal: why I’m here.

Dan: That is fantastic. And and by the way, the fact that you used stoked twice just, clearly speaks to the fact that the culture of the business is moving in the right direction. So, Susan, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Thank all very much.

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