CEO Calls Seniors PayPal’s Fastest-Growing Segment of ‘Net New Actives’

PayPal rode the pandemic’s e-commerce spike to its “strongest quarter” since eBay spun it off as an independent public company five years ago, said CEO Dan Schulman on a Q2 investor call Wednesday evening. “Merchants are embracing a digital-first strategy, and these trends have fueled the rapid rise of digital payments. These are durable and meaningful tailwinds.” Q2 transactions grew 26% to 3.7 billion, “rivaling the volumes that we usually experience during the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday,” said Schulman. PayPal added 21.3 million new customers, a 140% increase from the 2019 quarter, he said. “Net new actives” in Q2 exceeded the number of new customers added in all of 2016, he said. PayPal ended the quarter with 346 million active accounts, he said. “Given our momentum, I believe that we will add approximately 70 million net new actives this year.” PayPal is seeing “a tremendous amount of new cohorts coming in that have never used e-commerce before,” he said. Seniors are “the fastest-growing segment of net new actives,” he said. The stock closed 4.3% higher Thursday at $192.51.