“The company credits [P2P payments] functionality as driving its acquisition of new customers, of whom it added 8.7 million in the fourth quarter.”
Business is booming for PayPal’s mobile business: In a statement on its website, the company says it processed $155 billion in mobile payments last year, representing a 55 percent increase over 2016.
Meanwhile, Venmo, PayPal’s peer-to-peer payments platform, processed almost $35 billion in payments last year, representing a 95 percent jump over 2016. That appears to have been driven in part by the platform’s expanded capabilities, with PayPal having essentially upgraded Venmo to a mobile payments platform, allowing users to make purchases with online retailers. The company says Venmo can now be used to make payments with over 2 million such merchants.
P2P payments are still really important, however. The company credits this functionality as driving its acquisition of new customers, of whom it added 8.7 million in the fourth quarter. And the company says that by enabling customers in the US to transfer PayPal funds to their bank accounts through eligible debit cards, it expects to “help increase engagement and consideration of PayPal and Venmo.”
Of course, much of that activity points to growing competition with the likes of Apple, which has been encroaching on PayPal’s territory with the rise of its Apple Pay mobile payments platform and its new Apple Pay Cash service, which enables P2P payments between Apple device users, and also links to their credit and bank cards through Apple Pay. PayPal may be enjoying a boom in mobile payments right now, but its competition is going after more of the action, too.
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