PayPal’s CEO Looks to Kickstart Growth With Initiatives Like Fastlane and Complete Payments

PayPal Holding Inc.’s top management early Tuesday wasted no time extolling the early returns on several initiatives the payments company has launched in recent weeks to reinvigorate growth at the 26-year-old company. Chief executive Alex Chriss, in office for barely more than a year, made it clear he is exercising what he sees as underused assets.

“PayPal had fallen behind in innovation. It’s clear we had work to do,” Chriss told equity analysts as he reviewed his company’s September-quarter performance. “Today, I am more confident than ever about our future. PayPal has a massive global opportunity.”

PayPal’s growth agenda, in progress for months, appears to be yielding some measurable results. Fastlane, a streamlined checkout technology aimed at e-commerce merchants, has attracted more than 1,000 of them since its launch in August, Chriss said.

The technology, developed to address the often clunky guest-checkout procedures online sellers put in front of unregistered buyers, has been a major initiative at PayPal since Chriss took over. It smooths out the issues created by the fact that 60% of online transactions are guest checkouts, according to a number Chriss cited.

PayPal’s recent moves also include PayPal Complete Payments and PayPal Everywhere, both launched last month. The former involves a gateway to platforms like Adyen, Apple Pay, and Google Pay to enable broad payment access for smaller merchants. The latter is Chriss’s campaign to bring PayPal access to physical as well as online merchants and markeptaces. This effort, he noted, has added more than 1 million debit users since its launch, leading the company to plan expansion to Europe next year.

The reinvigoration project includes Venmo, PayPal’s popular peer-to-peer payments service. Here, Chriss plans to put the payments platform to work on a broader spectrum of duties. “Venmo will shift from solely a P2P service to be a central part of consumers’ lives,” he said. This effort begins with the Venmo debit card, where monthly active users and accounts are growing, according to Chriss.

But Pay with Venmo, a service for online purchases, claims just 8% of overall Venmo users so far as monthly active users. “We have room to grow,” Chriss said, adding that PayPal is now “leaning into Venmo marketing for the first time in years.”

Overall, Chriss was at pains to express optimism, particularly for his growth agenda. “We have an innovation machine that’s starting to ramp up,” he said. “We’re very excited about where we lean in over the next several quarters.”

For the quarter, PayPal processed $422.6 billion in total payment volume, up 9% year-over-year. Revenue rose 6% to $7.85 billion, while operating income increased 18% to $1.48 billion.

Active accounts came to 432 million, a 1% increase, while transactions per active account jumped 9% to 61.4.