PayPal Adds 6.6 Million Users Despite Growing Competition

During their recent corporate earnings call, PayPal’s Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman sounded happy when he announced that his company has managed to gain an additional 6.6 million new users in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Currently, PayPal has around 173 million registered accounts.

While PayPal is traditionally known to have a strong presence in the web based payments, Mr. Schulman mentioned that the momentum observed at the end of the year in user signup is driven mostly by shoppers who are increasing focus on mobile instead of the desktop.

Especially, the introduction of One Touch service that enabled users to login from their mobile phones once, then allow them to make a transaction drew attention of the users. Analysts said that compared to Q4 2014, this single feature helped PayPal to increase their mobile payment volume by 45%, to $20 billion.

Last quarter, PayPal’s average quarterly user signup numbers were around 4 million and industry experts were not sure if this surge could be sustained.

However, the latest report would prove that PayPal is turning the table as an independent company after being spun off from eBay last year.

Commenting on the latest signup trend, Mr. Schulman said that “while many others are attempting to play in this space, PayPal continues to gain market share.” He was of course indicating a number of companies trying to gain traction in the payment business, including, Apple and Samsung, two of the major mobile device manufacturers. “It’s becoming increasingly evident that payments is a hard business to crack,” he boasted.

While newcomers in the payment industry have been focusing on the consumer side of the business, PayPal has focused on offering quality features and services to both merchants and consumers, said Mr. Schulman. He said that PayPal offers a “comprehensive” range of service to create value for both groups of users.