PayPal at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovations

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, PayPal Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) participated in the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, where President and CEO Alex Chriss outlined the company’s strategic priorities and financial outlook. The discussion highlighted both growth opportunities and challenges, focusing on innovations in branded checkout, Venmo, and emerging technologies like stablecoins.

Key Takeaways

• PayPal is prioritizing improvements in branded checkout and expanding its reach with Pay with Venmo and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).
• The company is making a strategic shift towards omnichannel commerce with initiatives like PayPal Everywhere and PayPal World.
• Venmo is experiencing significant growth, with user adoption and monetization efforts driving a 20% increase.
• PayPal is investing in innovative areas such as agentic commerce and stablecoins, aiming to lead in the future of payments.
• The company plans to generate $6 to $7 billion in free cash flow this year, with a focus on organic growth and capital allocation.

Financial Results

• Branded checkout remains a core focus, with a long-term growth target of over 8%.
• Pay with Venmo is growing at a rate exceeding 45%.
• Buy Now, Pay Later achieved over $30 billion in total payment volume last year, with growth exceeding 20%.
• The company expects to end the year stronger, with a commitment to growing operating expenses at half or less than the growth of transaction margin.

Operational Updates

• New branded checkout experiences are being rolled out globally, positively impacting conversion rates.
• Over 60% of U.S. transactions now utilize the new checkout experiences.
• The launch of PayPal Everywhere in Germany has added 3 million new NFC enrollments.
• The Venmo ecosystem processes $18 billion of funds monthly.
• PayPal World integrates five major digital wallets, expanding the ecosystem from 400 million to 2 billion users.

Future Outlook

• PayPal plans to continue expanding mobile and checkout experiences globally.
• The company is focusing on making Buy Now, Pay Later a tool for customer acquisition.
• Venmo’s growth is expected to continue, driven by user adoption and monetization.
• Braintree’s shift towards value-added services is anticipated to enhance transaction margins.
• PayPal aims to create interoperable wallets worldwide with PayPal World.

Q&A Highlights

• Discussions emphasized the importance of branded checkout, Pay with Venmo, and BNPL.
• PayPal World was highlighted as a strategic initiative to expand the merchant market.
• The strategic shift of Braintree towards value-added services is expected to drive revenue growth.
• Innovations in agentic commerce and stablecoins were discussed as future payment opportunities.
• The capital allocation strategy focuses on organic growth, share buybacks, and potential dividends.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: All right. Up next, we’re very excited to have Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal. Alex stepped into the CEO role in 2023 following nearly 20 years at Intuit. Alex, thanks for joining us here for the second year in a row. I’m disappointed there’s no Will Ferrell commercial this year, but we will do.

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: It’s good to be here. Will will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I wanted to kick it off here on everyone’s favorite topic of PayPal’s flagship branded checkout. You have been clear that much of what you’re doing is with the goal of furthering the branded checkout service area and accelerating the growth of that business. Coming into this year and at the Investor Day, you laid out a path for accelerated growth exiting this year. The trade environment has made that a little bit harder to see from the outside. You called out some impacts from the de minimis exemption in this past quarter. If you peel back all of the different layers, what are you looking at under the surface that gives you confidence that the plan is going according to plan?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. Branded checkout remains a core focus for the organization. It’s where we’re putting a lot of our energy and a lot of our investment. There are three things that I would call out that we’re really focused on. The first is just the core branded checkout button. The second is Pay with Venmo. The third is Buy Now, Pay Later. To answer your question, if I pull back each of those, we’ve released new experiences on the core branded checkout button. These are now rolling out across the world. When I look at the cohorts of those experiences, we are seeing exactly what we would want to see in terms of the uptake in conversion rate. It’s really exciting to see the cohorts that we would want to see. That gives me confidence that as this continues to roll out, we’ll deliver where we want to.

On Pay with Venmo, we’re seeing 45% plus growth with Pay with Venmo. I think we’re just getting started in terms of merchant adoption and really igniting the consumer there. With Buy Now, Pay Later, we’re growing greater than 20% with Buy Now, Pay Later. This was a business that I hope we talk about more, but one that I think we’re just scratching the surface of the opportunity. When you add those three different elements up, that’s what gives us confidence and gives me increasing confidence in what we laid out at our Investor Day, which is getting to 8% plus in terms of branded checkout long term. Everything we’re seeing underneath the covers gives us that increased confidence. This is a big ship. It’s going to take time to get there. We’ll exit this year stronger than we started, and we’ll continue to inflect from there.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. On the trade environment, even since your earnings call, even this morning, there’s been nonstop headlines, including further actions around the de minimis exemption. Can you update us on your latest thoughts on the operating environment and the policy actions that have occurred over the last month or so?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah, every day is a new adventure. I think what I’d share is there’s really no new news to share in terms of the impact to us. There’s always puts and takes across time, but what we’re seeing is still very consistent. If I look at what we’ve done the last few quarters and what we look at going forward, at least right now, we’re still solidly in that mid-single-digit branded checkout level that we had talked about. Nothing new to report on tariffs that are impacting us.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. Let’s pivot over to the product enhancements. A big focus for this year was continuing to chip away at upgrading the technical integrations on the PayPal checkout surface area. What’s the state of the union on where you are on those initiatives, and what can you share about the impact that this is having?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. Just as a reminder, you know, when I stepped into the role just under two years ago, branded checkout very clearly became the opportunity for us to really bring innovation back into the organization and, you know, take a product that is loved and used by hundreds of millions of users around the world, but reignite the innovation. The primary focus was on improving conversion and specifically on mobile. We really rallied the entire company behind ensuring that we’re using the best practices when it comes to biometrics and conversion and even updating the design of our checkout page to ensure that we have an uplift in checkout. We took some time, built that product, and are now rolling it out around the world. We started in the U.S. We’ve now broken 60%. More than 60% of our transactions are now on the new experiences in the U.S.

We’ve now started to roll out in the UK and Germany. If you look at our global transactions, this is still about 15%, mid double digits, mid teens when it comes to the actual transaction. It’s still very small when it comes to the actual impact to the business. When I look at the cohorts of merchants that are fully optimized and up and running on the new experience, we’re seeing tremendous improvement when it comes to conversion. That’s what gives us confidence that as we continue to roll this out, as we now start to get momentum from merchants that are seeing that from their competitors, seeing that from others, we’re able to share that data and they want in.

We actually think now as we roll out globally, we’re going to see an uptake and an increase in our trajectory, but very, very encouraging to see the new design, the new implementation driving the improvement.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great. You mentioned Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) earlier, it’s a major part of the story and it’s a clear expansion of the consumer value proposition of PayPal in recent years. I’ve certainly noticed the BNPL offering much more front and center through the checkout flow. Are you seeing that drive the intended benefits and just more broadly, how do you see BNPL playing a role for PayPal going forward?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. I’m very excited about Buy Now, Pay Later. This is a product we did over $30 billion in TPV last year. To be transparent, it was not a core focus of the business. If you looked at where our Buy Now, Pay Later showed up, it really showed up almost post-purchase. Once they’d chosen the PayPal button, it was an instrument option inside of the PayPal experience. That’s fantastic. That shows that we’ve got great customer loyalty, great customer brand awareness, but we really hadn’t moved Buy Now, Pay Later to where our merchants really want it, which is upstream as a customer acquisition tool, as something that sits at the beginning of purchase, pre-purchase, so that consumers actually know, hey, I have this Buy Now, Pay Later option available and I can increase my conversion rate and increase my purchase power with Buy Now, Pay Later.

That is a shift that we’re making internally. You’re now starting to see the Pay Later button show up upstream. It’s an area when I talk to merchants globally, and this is a global product for us. They are looking for PayPal to get into this game and to really start to leverage the brand that we have, leverage the experience that we have, and the customer ability to have this show up inside of the wallet, but then also in every purchase. You’re going to see a real effort from us on the BNPL side, something that we’re going to be communicating in our go-to-market messaging from a consumer standpoint, as well as really starting to accelerate where Pay Later shows upstream in terms of merchant adoption. What’s amazing is BNPL is available to every PayPal branded merchant just inside of the button.

We just never pulled it out and made it upstream. That’s a real change in our focus and something that we think is going to continue to accelerate our Buy Now, Pay Later growth. It’s already growing at scale at over 20%. Very, very excited about where BNPL can go. The last part that I think is also important is we’re seeing behavior shift as well. When we go and talk to consumers, we’re seeing a younger demographic that is moving away from credit card. They’ve seen their parents go through the 2008, 2009 challenges and have said to us, "I do not want a credit card. I want to pay through debit. I don’t want to pay through Buy Now, Pay Later." That’s where we’re seeing both our debit product as well as our Buy Now, Pay Later product as really a big future growth driver for us.

Unidentified speaker: That’s great. Okay. Another one on branded checkout. Fairly or unfairly, people focus on the U.S. growth dynamics, just given how competitive the U.S. is. There’s a sense that the U.S. competitive dynamics are worse than the international landscape, just given the proliferation of checkout tools and the concentration of the e-commerce market. How do you think about the U.S. market specifically and the ability to retain and grow share?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. Look, we have competition everywhere. We’ve specifically doubled down on the U.S. when it comes to our go-to-market. You mentioned Will Ferrell earlier. You’ve seen our campaigns there. When we look at the experiences that I mentioned earlier, the new mobile experiences, the new checkout experience, we started rolling them out in the U.S. first. We are seeing the uplift that we wanted. If I look at the U.S. branded checkout, we are growing faster today than we were a year ago. We are starting to see the impact of the new experiences starting to have material impact to our U.S. improvement. The U.S. is a game that we have been in since the beginning. It’s one that we have a tremendous amount of loyal customers, not just with PayPal, but also with Venmo as well. It’s one that we intend to fight and win.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Finally, on the checkout side, the Investor Day put a spotlight on a new disclosure around branded experiences, including Pay with Venmo and some of your offline modes. We will get to Venmo in a second. I think it’s worth spending some time there. How are you thinking about the offline experiences and the PayPal Everywhere product that you announced a year ago with Will Ferrell at this conference?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. This was a big strategic shift for the company. PayPal has always been thought of as an e-commerce player. When I came in and we talked to our consumers, the feedback was, "Hey, we love PayPal. We use it for our e-commerce purchases." Really, I think about my purchases. I don’t think about online and in-store. I just think about purchasing. I want to use the trust, the safety, and the reliability that I know and I love with PayPal. I want to use it for every purchase. We really thought about omnichannel as a growth driver for us. A year ago, we launched PayPal Everywhere. Since then, we’ve added 5 million new debit card actives. We’ve launched PayPal Everywhere with a tap-to-pay NFC first product in Germany, where we’ve added 3 million new NFC enrollments since we launched in Germany.

The demand from our customer base, again, this is a loyal PayPal customer base, as well as new entrants coming in saying, "Hey, I can now use PayPal for every purchase, everywhere, every time, whether it’s online or whether it’s in-store." That allows us to now go to our merchants and start to leverage some of the additional value-added products that we have, like ads, where we’re now able to have a really 360 type of conversation with our merchants to say, "Hey, we have customers that are making purchases online as well as in-store. Do you want to be able to have personalized data for them? Do you want to be able to create rewards and offers no matter where they make that purchase?" PayPal, this is all part of our transformation from a payments company to a commerce company.

In order to be a commerce company, we need to be available everywhere a consumer wants to make a purchase. We’re really excited about this beginning in offline. We’ve shared this PayPal branded experience metric that’s now growing 8%+ pretty consistently. Obviously, there’s a lot of focus on the e-commerce side, but over time, I think it’ll be important for everyone to really pay attention to this branded experience because it shows the full breadth of what the PayPal experience can be and how consumers are thinking about us now in an omnichannel world.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. Shifting gears to Venmo, Venmo has seen a nice acceleration over the past year. What’s fundamentally changed on the Venmo side, and how do you think about the growth outlook and strategy from a user perspective?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah, I think this was maybe the number one thing I heard when I joined the company was, you know, why is PayPal or why is Venmo not able to monetize? Why is there no growth there? If you look at where we are now, you know, 18 or so months later with focus from the organization, putting the weight of the company behind this incredible product, we’re really seeing exciting growth. Customer base is number one and continuing to grow. Pay with Venmo we talked about earlier is really starting to take off. We started to lean into monetization levers with our debit card as well. When we looked at our debit card experience, the penetration into our base was really minimal, and there were some clear reasons why.

We had not invested in making the debit card a part of the onboarding and a part of the reboarding experience for our customers. We had $18 billion of funds that were moving into the ecosystem, into the Venmo ecosystem every month, and much of that would bounce out. We invested in educating our customer base about the Venmo debit card. You’ve seen some of the new products that we’ve put out, our partnership with the Big 10, Big 12, where we now have branded debit card experiences. We are all over college campuses. This is a very valuable demographic. Our teen product all the way through sort of 18 to 29. We’re now seeing some really exciting changes in the Venmo product. Not only is the debit card adoption moving up significantly, but we’re actually now starting to see consumers putting more money into the ecosystem.

We’re seeing greater levels of direct deposit, greater levels of money moving in to making Venmo your everyday balance, where you can now use it online with Pay with Venmo or in an omnichannel offline experience with your debit card. Again, just Venmo is such an exciting product because this for many young adults is the first place where they are getting access to their money. You know, I now have two sons in college. This is the way that I fund them. It’s the way I send them money if they need to pay rent or they need to buy books or they need to go out and buy food. I sent my son money to buy a bike because he needed to get from class to class. This is the way parents and students are working together.

For students that are on campus, it’s the way they actually split meals. It’s the way they’re having these experiences right now. They can go out and, you know, buy a pizza with their team and actually use Venmo to not only pay for the pizza now with their debit card, but have their teammates reimburse them. This is really not only a verb from a peer-to-peer perspective, but now it’s becoming the way that this incredible demographic is spending in an omnichannel world.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I mean, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Venmo Groups, which is probably one of my favorite products. I’ve used it a million times and think it’s been a great customer experience and an add-on to the product. How are you thinking about additional product enhancements to Venmo over time to continue the momentum?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah, so this is, if you really think about what’s different about Venmo, and this is where we should bring back Pay with Venmo. If you think about the omnichannel experience, if you think about where you make purchases, the difference between Venmo and any other branded experience out there is Venmo is that purchase that you make as an experience with others. What happens today is Venmo is often the way you reimburse, whether it’s through groups or just through peer-to-peer, you reimburse your friends or your family for a purchase that’s made after the fact. The question we’re asking ourselves is, if you all went to dinner and then you reimbursed everyone for Venmo, or you know, you rented the house for the vacation and then you reimbursed everyone through Venmo, how could we create that experience upfront?

How could we make that purchase happen at the point of purchase through the Venmo experience? These are the types of things that, again, are totally different than any other branded experience. This is where people are coming together with their friends and their families, and they’re making purchases and they’re creating experiences and memories, and they’re using Venmo to distribute, to create those groups. We think that’s an incredible purchasing opportunity upfront as well, and a great opportunity for us to match merchants that want to find those consumers and those groups of consumers at the moment of purchase and create the right special offers, the right deals, and the right incentives.

We’re going to really lean into leveraging this incredible demographic, teen through 29 and above, with incredible purchase power that now has debit card and Pay with Venmo and money moving into the ecosystem and is already thinking about Venmo as part of the experience and has all of their friends and family as part of their groups. Now, how do we make those purchases happen? Just pay attention there. This is one we’re going to be investing in heavily. You’ve seen the business already start to grow. Venmo is now growing north of 20%. I think we’re just getting started there.

Unidentified speaker: I mean, let’s continue that conversation because the user growth has been very strong in Venmo. You just called out the Pay with Venmo stats in particular. I guess I wanted to talk about the significance of Pay with Venmo being in the branded experiences number. You know, we’ve been talking to clients about this sort of Facebook, Instagram analogy. There’s a different growth and demographic profile on the branded platform versus the Pay with Venmo platform. Fundamentally, internally, I know you’ve harmonized the go-to-market teams. I’ve seen them out in the wild right next to each other on merchants’ checkout page. When we think about the combination of these two products, how do you view it in the context of the market share conversation about U.S. branded checkout?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Look, we are a company that wants to optimize for as much of the commerce story as we can. Whether you want to use Venmo or whether you want to use PayPal, we want to be there for you. We are starting to bring the platforms together and at the same time, create unique experiences amongst each of the different cohorts. What does it mean to bring them together? As part of our PayPal World launch, we actually talked about bringing PayPal and Venmo into one ecosystem where for the first time, not only can you move money from a peer-to-peer perspective between the ecosystems, but any Venmo user in the future will be able to actually click on a PayPal branded button and checkout. That is now opening up the entire world of PayPal checkout to a Venmo user.

At the same time, there are going to be unique experiences like I just talked about where Venmo, you know, you’re buying with a group, you’re buying with your cohort. We think there are great experiences and great opportunities to be able to create differentiated experiences for that Venmo cohort. In addition, there is something different about just the way you interact with Venmo as well. Most of what we talk about when we talk about PayPal branded checkout is purchasing from product-based businesses. Right? Product-based businesses that sell a product that they either hand to you or ship to you. That is about 30% of overall commerce and small business. 70% is service-based businesses. These are the dog walkers, the hairdressers, the landscapers. This is where Venmo also has a tremendous advantage. Venmo is disrupting cash and disrupting invoicing from those service-based businesses.

We are starting to lean into that more and more. The more that your landscaper can just say, "Hey, Venmo me." Right? Which is that verb that they start to do. That starts to open up more and more opportunities. I think we have, again, just scratching the surface there. It has become the ubiquitous way that people want to get paid. I think we now have the opportunity to create more products and services for those small businesses to run their service-based business, as well as consumers to be able to think about how to work in those experiences and those groups together to pay their product and service-based businesses.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. You mentioned PayPal World. Let’s talk about it because I thought it was a very cool new initiative. I think it really puts a spotlight on the renewed product velocity at the company. Could you give us just a refresher? What is PayPal World? How do you think about the vision for the product over time?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. The concept of PayPal World is we have a fundamental belief that digital wallets are the future. We are seeing tremendous growth in digital wallets, and we believe on a global scale, everyone at some point will just migrate and that will be the way that you pay. It’s already happening. This isn’t a tremendous statement, but we know that future is coming. We also believe that there should be a world where these wallets are interoperable. Today, you can go from one country to another and not be able to make a purchase because your wallet isn’t accepted in a tap-to-pay experience or even in an e-commerce experience in a country that may be right next door to where you are. We believe if wallets are the future, there needs to be an interoperable platform that connects all of those wallets. PayPal World is that platform.

We started by bringing together five of the world’s largest, including PayPal, Venmo, WeChat, Mercado Pago, as well as UPI. Together, that takes the PayPal Venmo ecosystem from 400 million to 2 billion. What does that mean? It means consumers within those wallets will be able to send money to each other. There’s now a universal directory where you can type in a phone number and be able to find anyone within that ecosystem. It means as a merchant, an online merchant, you can now accept a payment without having to do additional work from a wallet from anyone in that ecosystem. If you’re a UPI user in India and you want to go shop at a merchant in Germany, you can click on the PayPal button. We will identify who you are. We’ll show your UPI wallet. You can click on that and just check out an e-commerce solution.

It means in an offline scenario, omnichannel, you can now actually travel. You could be a Mercado Pago user, travel to the U.S., and actually tap to pay wherever PayPal is accepted. We are creating an interoperable ecosystem of wallets. We started with those five. We’ll be launching later this fall. I expect, we already know from inbound that we’ll be adding additional wallets over time. This to me is a really, really exciting opportunity. The economics are there as well. That example I used of a UPI user making a purchase in Germany, the way we’ve set up the platform, that’s a branded checkout experience for us. For all of our PayPal merchants, we just took the addressable market from 400 million to 2 billion. 2 billion users can now click on a PayPal button and make a checkout experience.

That’s a branded checkout experience for us with branded economics.

Unidentified speaker: Can you talk a little bit about the economics there? I guess flipping that around, the UPI user checking out with PayPal for a European merchant and then the European consumer checking out via an Indian merchant accepting UPI. How do the economics work for PayPal there?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. The way to think about it is we’ve enabled each of the different platforms to be able to maintain their own economics. If it’s a PayPal merchant, we maintain our economics. If it’s a UPI merchant, UPI maintains their economics. Everyone gets to, it’s a win-win-win. The consumers get access to additional merchants and consumers. The merchants get access to additional consumers to be able to make purchases, and the platforms get additional addressable markets. That’s a win. We maintain some processing fees as the platform holder as well. It’s early days.

This will take time to ramp like anything, but it’s one of those things, if you think about all the global experiences that not only exist today, but that are coming even in the next 12 to 18 months with the Olympics, with the World Cup, with the travel that’s really opening up, we think this is a great opportunity for us to put a stake in the ground, bring the largest wallets in the world together, and declare we want to be the platform that is creating interoperable wallets around the world.

Unidentified speaker: You talked about mostly in the context of commerce. Does this also have an interplay on the remittances side? PayPal is obviously a big player there.

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yes, I mean everything will work there as well.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. All right. Shifting gears to Braintree, this was one of the biggest strategic pivots that you made when you took over. We’re coming up on the anniversary of some of the significant changes to merchant agreements you made a year ago that’s driven a big uplift in transaction margin growth, and it’s driven improving take rate trends over the past year. As we get past this period of really targeted benefits, how do you think about the more go-forward sustainable trajectory of transaction margins and monetization in Braintree? How does that break down between payments and value-added services?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. As a reminder, we really, again, made a big strategic pivot. We sat down with our merchants and said, "We are going to invest in value-added services, and we’re going to price to value our processing as well as our value-added services." We were very transparent and had some very good and fruitful negotiations with our merchants and worked through a period of about 18 months where these were new contracts. I know that was a difficult time to see revenue pressure on us, but it was the right thing for the long term. If I then answer your question for the long term, we’ve hit the inflection point. We’ve sort of bottomed out on those negotiations. I expect going forward for revenue to continue to increase and rebound back to sort of market growth or above levels.

I expect transaction margin to continue to, for Braintree to continue to be a transaction margin accretive part of our business as it has been over the last few quarters. Again, it was the right thing to do. It was, you know, maybe difficult to work through at times, but we’re now moving forward with really incredible value-added services, risk as a service, payouts, which again, we have unique elements by being able to not only provide a payout service, but payouts into wallets like PayPal and Venmo that nobody else can provide. I think we’re just getting started and really being able to provide incredible value-added services and processing to the market.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. PayPal has talked a lot about a modern shopping experience in agentic commerce, particularly at the Investor Day. I know it’s early days. You know, we heard from Visa about their perspective this morning. I’m curious about how you think about where the customer-facing value proposition for agentic commerce will live. By that, I mean, you know, is this going to live in the LLMs? Is this going to be on Google Search or on Amazon? Does it live somewhere in an app that looks like PayPal or one of your competitors? You know, who ultimately has the right to win in agentic commerce for the consumer-facing technology?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Yeah. I think we’re very excited about agentic commerce. We’ve been investing in it from the beginning. It’s something I talked about in Investor Day. We were first to market with a remote MCP server to enable agentic commerce for our merchants and for the AI platforms. I sort of see AI as a ubiquitous element. I don’t think it’s going to live in one place only. I really feel like there will be apps that are specific and unique and personalized for certain checkout experiences or certain products. There will be agents that people use. We’re preparing for AI to be ubiquitous and for agentic commerce to be ubiquitous. That’s exciting for us because commerce isn’t easy. You still need really important KYC, KYB. You need to understand how money moves.

You need to make sure that risk and fraud and all the elements that happen pre-purchase and post-purchase still happen. Consumers still need to understand shipping. They need to understand how to do returns. They need to understand how to get in contact with the merchant. Merchants want to actually build relationships with consumers. They can’t just have an AI agent do something on their behalf, but they don’t actually build an ongoing relationship where they can drive LTV over time. These are the things that PayPal is excellent at. It’s the things we’re starting to expose to our merchants and to AI agents through our MCP server. It’s things that we think are just going to continue to expand our opportunity as a leader in the space as we think about bringing commerce together.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Just to hit on stablecoins, you know, PayPal has been investing in stablecoins long before stablecoin summer. There’s a two-part question here. Where do you see the opportunities for PayPal and stablecoins? Then second, what’s your response to some of the investor questions around stablecoins as a threat to the payments ecosystem as a whole?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: I’ll hit both of those together. I don’t quite know what a threat to the payment ecosystem means. To me, this is any time that you can continue to create more efficient ways to move money and more efficient ways for commerce to occur, that’s an advantage. It’s one of the reasons that PayPal was one of the first movers. We launched PYUSD maybe before anybody else, and it’s something we continue to invest in. We also think we have a unique advantage, right? At the end of the day, when we talk to consumers, they don’t really care that much about the mechanics of stablecoins. That’s why you’re not seeing a lot of uptake right now in stablecoins as a payment vehicle.

I think it’s unlikely that you’re going to have consumers a few years from now negotiating between four or five different stablecoins of how they want to pay each time. I think they just want a wallet and they want to make a payment and they want friction out of the system. Now, if we can be that wallet, which we are, and with not only the largest wallets between PayPal and Venmo, but now with PayPal World, we can actually leverage stablecoins as an underlying mechanism to remove friction and cost and latency out of the ecosystem. That’s a huge opportunity for us.

I see stablecoins as just the next evolution of payments, and it’s a great opportunity for us to remove unnecessary friction and unnecessary cost from the ecosystem, provide an even better customer experience for both peer-to-peer, B2C, B2B payments, and do that in a way where we can actually take the complexity of the underlying ecosystem out of the way for consumers and do it through a wallet that they know and trust. We’re super excited about the future. It’s going to take time. The first use cases are likely to be cross-border use cases, which have the most friction. This will take time to build, but it’s one where we think we’re well positioned to lead going forward.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Maybe more of a numbers question. You and Jamie have been able to focus the organization, accelerate product velocity, and you’ve been able to do that in the context of kind of low to mid-single-digit OpEx growth. How do you think about investing in growth and profitable growth in the business while also maintaining that focus?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Look, we are a growth company. We are focused on investing in the things that are most important, whether that’s our engineering, our marketing, our go-to-market, ensuring branded checkout continues to grow and accelerate. We also believe that we have opportunities to continue to manage cost and find efficiencies in the business. We’ve committed to growing OPEX at half or less than half than TM growth, and we think we can do that while continuing to grow the business.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Okay. Let’s talk capital allocation. The company’s been very diligent on the share repurchases side. Can you talk about capital allocation strategy kind of more holistically? In particular, if you could talk about your thoughts on paying a dividend?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Our primary focus is organic growth. We have been thinking about, obviously, we are an incredible free cash flow machine. We’re going to do $6 to $7 billion this year. Our primary vehicle has been share buybacks. That’s been very successful for us and something that we will continue to do. Dividends are something we talk about and something that I could see in our future if the timing is right. Right now, our focus is making sure that we’ve got firepower if needed in the M&A market, but really a deep focus on organic growth.

Unidentified speaker: Perfect. Okay. We’re about at time, but I wanted to give you a choice here between pay with crypto, ads, PCPP, Fastlane, all the things that we haven’t talked about today. What do you think we should have talked about and why are you excited about it?

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: I think the fact that you’re asking the question of, look at all the fun things we could talk about, is kind of the most important thing. Two years ago, when I stepped into the role, there was a pervasive feeling when I went on my investor talk that there wasn’t a lot of innovation coming out of PayPal. There certainly wasn’t a lot of growth. When you look at where we are now, we’ve turned around just about everything we set out to turn around. We’ve talked about Venmo accelerating now 20%. We’ve talked about PSP now turned around and being a significant contributor to transaction margin.

The advancements we have in branded checkout and branded checkout experiences where we’re now moving into omnichannel, PayPal World as the future, crypto as an opportunity for us to lean into, agentic commerce, all of these things we are now leading and innovating in in a rapid fashion. I think when you just take a step back and you look at the transaction margin that we’re putting out, the opportunity to continue to accelerate in branded checkout, and the brand resonance that we have on a global scale, we are growing and growing at scale with lots of opportunities to disrupt in the future. I’m just very proud of the company right now and very proud of the innovation and the velocity that we have in bringing new products to market. I think you’re going to see us just continue to do that.

Unidentified speaker: Awesome. Alex, I think we’re out of time, but thank you so much for taking the time today. Really appreciate the opportunity.

Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal: Thank you.

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