PayPal investor day: Partnerships, Venmo monetization to fuel growth
Video: PayPal agrees $2.2 billion deal to acquire iZettle
PayPal held its bi-annual investor day on Thursday and outlined key points of its growth strategy as its rivalries with Square and Amazon heat up.
Read also: PayPal enables Venmo payments at millions of US retailers
PayPal CEO Dan Schulman kicked off the parade of executive presentations by touting PayPal's relationship with retailers and other merchants -- an unspoken contrast to Amazon -- and it's evolution into a robust service provider.
"We are becoming a solutions company instead of just a buttons company," Schulman said.
A key aspect of PayPal's "solutions company" agenda is its use of partnerships and integrations. On that front, PayPal said it's entered an expanded partnership with Google that will make PayPal available throughout multiple Google apps and services as a new standard payment method.
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The integration will let users sign into their PayPal account on any Google app or service using Google Pay. Afterward, PayPal will remain available as a payment option across the Google ecosystem without additional logins.
On the eBay situation, PayPal insists the winding down of the partnership is a positive, as it gives PayPal the freedom to partner with other online marketplaces where its small business customers are selling.
Earlier this year eBay announced that Dutch fintech company Adyen would become its primary payments processor as the online marketplace works to move its payments intermediary service in-house. PayPal's been eBay's preferred provider for the past 15 years, and transactions through eBay account for about 13 percent of total payments processed by PayPal.
In terms of Venmo, PayPal's largely unmonetized social payments platform, PayPal COO Bill Ready highlighted newer fee-based services including instant transfers, co-marketing with other financial service providers, and the yet-to-be-announced launch of a physical Venmo debit card.
"Venmo has surpassed 10 percent of users engaging in monetization experiences," Ready said, suggesting that monetization efforts gaining momentum.
Discussing its massive $2.2 billion purchase of iZettle, announced just last week, PayPal said the deal will give a significant boost to its omnichannel capabilities and open up substantial cross-selling opportunities between their existing customers.
With iZettle's help, PayPal is hoping to expand its international footprint and better compete against companies like Square for a spot in physical storefronts. Launched in 2010, iZettle brings PayPal hundreds of thousands of customers in a dozen countries in Europe and Latin America, including in-store payments capabilities in 11 international markets.
iZettle also recently launched an e-commerce platform for merchants, which sets up competition between PayPal and Shopify.
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