PayPal Mobile Payments Operations See Jump in 2016

The numbers are in for 2016, and PayPal had an excellent year as not only a payment platform, but also as a mobile payments system. The recent word released noted that PayPal’s mobile payments value was up 55 percent in 2016, and that wasn’t all the company had to talk about.

The fourth quarter alone saw PayPal’s mobile payments volume account for about one transaction in three, with a combined total of $31 billion in mobile payments processed just in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s Venmo mobile payments app did impressive business of its own, bringing in $5.6 billion in total payments processed, which was up fully 126 percent from the same time in 2015. Throw in another 40 million consumers-plus turning to PayPal’s OneTouch at the end of 2016 and it’s clear there’s upward momentum afoot.

Dan Schulman, PayPal’s CEO, commented “Mobile is becoming an increasingly important competitive differentiator for PayPal—more than half of our active account base transacted on the PayPal platform using their mobile device over the last 12 months. We saw strong growth in peer-to-peer payments, with P2P payment volume growing 57%, to more than $64bn for the year.”

The numbers look impressive, and all add up to mean roughly the same thing: PayPal is more than just a clearinghouse for eBay transactions and as a means for small businesses to readily pay contractors. PayPal is now every bit as potent a mobile payments solution as many other alternatives, and while the available locations may not be quite as extensive as some—Samsung Pay still leads the way here thanks to the Hannibal Buress commercial at Katz’s Deli—it’s going to be sufficient to get and keep users in the fold. There may be only 23 retailers taking PayPal right now, but when these included Home Depot, that’s no small feat.

PayPal has made great strides as a mobile payment alternative, and though it has a ways to go as yet, there’s still plenty of room for this to be a top-notch success.