Transcripts

PayPal Holdings, Inc.'s management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.

Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2026

Enrique Lores's first call as CEO: the clearest statement yet of what a new leader thinks is broken and the framework he will use to fix it. · Open the full transcript →

The incoming CEO's diagnosis: strong assets, but strategic and operational problems that need real change.

Enrique Lores (CEO): I'm stepping into this role at an important moment for PayPal. I appreciate the opportunity to serve as CEO and I'm confident we will accelerate the growth of the company while improving profitability and cash flow. That is why I'm here. At the same time, I'm also realistic that we need to make significant changes to address the strategic and operational issues the company has faced. […] we need to recommit to the fundamentals. That includes becoming a technology company again, sharpening our focus on consumers, aligning the company around three strong businesses and simplifying how we work with clear accountability and a stronger emphasis on execution.

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The reorganization into three single-owner businesses and the bet on unifying the two-sided network.

Enrique Lores (CEO): The changes we announced last week will organize the company into three lines of business, each with a single leader: Checkout Solutions and PayPal; Consumer Financial Services and Venmo; and Payment Services and Braintree. Importantly, we are bringing together the two sides of the network to maximize our competitive advantage.

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The cost of the turnaround: growth investments are a deliberate ~3-point drag on transaction-margin-dollar growth this year.

Jamie Miller (Chief Financial and Operating Officer): We continue to expect our targeted growth investments to represent approximately a three-point headwind to transaction margin dollars growth in 2026, while driving durable long-term benefits in the years ahead.

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Asked directly whether Venmo or Braintree could be sold, Lores commits to keeping and investing in all three.

Darrin Peller (Wolfe Research); Enrique Lores (CEO): can you just walk through your thought process on your review of your assets in the company in a sense of which assets you actually absolutely feel like you must keep as part of the go-forward entity? If there are assets you would consider selling, where you stand on Venmo. […] So let me start by saying that our number-one priority, my number-one priority, is to maximize shareholder value. At this point, I believe that the best approach is to invest in our three core businesses — PayPal, Venmo and Braintree — to drive profitable growth. Because in each of them, we see the opportunity to make it happen.

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Where the checkout redesign actually stands — and why the new button is only one lever among many.

Enrique Lores (CEO): Today, 45% of non-volatile customers are already experiencing the new simplified version. So we have continued to make progress quarter-over-quarter and the plan is to continue that in the coming quarters. But it's not only about that. What we have learned is this is one element of the many that we need to do. When we combine our new checkout process with financial services and BNPL, we see also significant improvement and significant acceleration of growth.

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Q4 & Full-Year FY2025 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2025

The call that broke the thesis: a CEO change, a branded-checkout collapse to 1% growth, and the withdrawal of the 2027 targets. · Open the full transcript →

The leadership change and an unusually blunt admission that execution has fallen short.

Jamie Miller (Interim CEO): The Board has appointed Enrique Lores, who was most recently our Board Chair, as the next President and CEO of PayPal effective March 1 to accelerate execution and bring greater discipline to how we implement our strategic priorities as we enter our next phase of growth. I want to thank Alex Chriss for his leadership and his many contributions to the company. […] At the same time, we recognize as a company that our execution has not been what it needs to be. We have not moved fast enough or with the level of focus required, and we are taking immediate steps to address that reality.

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Guidance philosophy resets: the multi-year Investor Day outlook is pulled, replaced by one year at a time.

Jamie Miller (Interim CEO): given everything I've outlined, we are no longer committing to the specific outlook for 2027 we laid out at Investor Day last year. For these reasons, we think it's prudent for now to provide financial guidance one year at a time.

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The hardest question on the change — is it about execution or a coming strategy overhaul? Management says execution.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Jamie Miller (Interim CEO): can you give us some assurance that the change is primarily to address execution rather than the strategy? […] So the Board's decision is based on execution. They have been discussing this for the past few months. […] our execution is just too slow. And both the Board and Enrique have been deeply involved in setting our plans strategically and around our initiatives, and that carries into what our execution plan is in 2026.

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The bear case, stated plainly — can branded be turned around, and can earnings grow if it can't?

Harshita Rawat (Bernstein); Jamie Miller (Interim CEO): I think a question which is in investors' minds is whether the branded business can be turned around or if the shift has tailed. […] Can PayPal grow earnings if branded doesn't improve from here? […] even with a low mid-single-digit branded checkout profile in 2025, we delivered very solid transaction margin dollar growth. We delivered mid-teens earnings per share growth. And so I think there continues to be a lot of ways we can win here.

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Why PayPal won't just go all-in on merchants: the two-sided network only works with both sides.

Dan Dolev (Mizuho); Steven Winoker (Chief Investor Relations Officer): it's our view that you can't win without both. The consumer, you've got to bring strength with the consumer to these merchant negotiations and discussions. That's one of the major reasons merchants want to work with us. And at the same time, you need to bring merchants to the consumers as well. So both are absolutely critical.

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Q1 FY2024 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2024

Chriss's transformation year in operating detail — Fastlane, pricing Braintree to value, and the unit economics behind engagement. · Open the full transcript →

The debut of Fastlane, PayPal's guest-checkout play to win the ~60% of shoppers who don't log in.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): We continue to make good progress in our early testing of Fastlane by PayPal with a focused group of merchants. Data from those alpha merchants show that returning Fastlane users are converting at nearly 80%. We are just getting started and already creating a low double-digit lift in guest checkout conversion for participating merchants.

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The 'price to value' pivot on the unbranded/Braintree side, monetizing value-added services rather than chasing volume.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): We've begun active discussions with our largest enterprise customers to focus on commercial outcomes that reflect the true value of our payments processing platform and the services we provide. […] As we evaluate our programs, we see clear opportunities to price to value, not only with our PSP processing but especially with our value-added services that we already provide, services such as payouts, fraud prevention, and processing orchestration.

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The economics behind the strategy: deeper product adoption roughly doubles revenue per merchant account.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): On average, merchants who adopt PPCP use approximately 4 PayPal products, which deepens the relationship and reduces churn. This translates to an average revenue per account for our PPCP full-stack merchant that is nearly 2x that of an SMB on a legacy integration.

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Q3 FY2023 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2023

Alex Chriss's first call as CEO — the diagnosis of a company that lost focus and the pivot from growth-at-all-costs to profitable growth. · Open the full transcript →

The new CEO's opening read: strong assets, but scattered focus and unclear execution.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): Our innovation activity has accelerated but we still have work to do on maximizing our impact for our customers' end results. Competition and complexity have increased, and the company's focus has not been clear. […] But let me be clear, notwithstanding those realities, this is a growth company with great prospects.

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The defining pivot: profit, not user count, becomes the yardstick for how the company is run.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): what I care about most is high-quality customer growth and profitable revenue growth. Going forward, PayPal will be focused on generating real profit for the company. I can't emphasize that last statement enough. […] Unprofitable growth is counterproductive to the long-term prospects of this or any other growth-oriented company.

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How Braintree makes money at scale — and the plan to convert that volume into margin.

Alex Chriss (President and CEO): We have proven that we can win in the market and take share with Braintree, serving the largest enterprises such as Adobe, Booking.com, DoorDash, Ticketmaster and Uber. In the last 12 months, we processed over $450 billion in volume out of an estimated $4 trillion to $5 trillion of global large enterprise ecommerce. That's approximately 10% flowing through us.

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Putting the profit-over-growth pivot into practice: deliberately churning off low-quality accounts.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP Corporate Finance and Acting CFO): during the quarter, active accounts declined by 2.8 million as we continue to flush out low-quality customers predominantly in Latin America and Southeast Asia. As a reminder, we said this would be a year where we churn off lower-quality actives and in which total accounts would decline.

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Q4 & Full-Year FY2021 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2021

The Schulman-era reset: PayPal abandons its 750-million-account ambition and cuts guidance, marking the top before the multi-year de-rating. · Open the full transcript →

The scale of the franchise at its pandemic peak — and the engagement metric management would come to prize.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO): We surpassed $1 trillion in annual TPV for the first time in our history, ending the year with $1.25 trillion of total payment volume. We had a record 5.3 billion transactions in Q4 alone, up 21%. We added 49 million net new active accounts to exit the year with 426 million active accounts, including 34 million merchants. In the last two years, we added 122 million net new active accounts. And despite that spike in new users, our transactions per active account grew to 45 this past year, an 11% increase.

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The eBay overhang quantified: a 700-basis-point drag on revenue growth as the marketplace migrated off PayPal.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO): eBay's migration to managed payments happened faster than we anticipated. Overall, eBay put $1.4 billion of pressure on our top line, reducing our revenue growth by 700 basis points. Ex eBay, our revenue growth was very strong, growing 29% on a spot basis for the full year and 22% in Q4.

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The rationale for the engagement pivot: app users are worth far more and churn far less than checkout-only users.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO): our super app is showing extraordinarily promising early results. Now we only rolled that out fully in the middle of October across all of iOS and Android, so we're three or four months into it. But what are we seeing? We're seeing double the average revenue per active account when somebody uses our app versus just checkout. When somebody uses the app their propensity to churn is 25% less.

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The guidance cut: 2022 revenue growth trimmed to 15%–17% from a previously indicated ~18%.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO): The persistence of inflationary effects on personal consumption, labor shortages, supply chain issues, and weaker consumer sentiment have led us to adopt a more cautious outlook. On last quarter's call, we preliminarily indicated high teens revenue growth for this year and said that if we had to pinpoint it, it would be around 18%. We have an incredible business, but we are not immune to the vagaries of the economy. Based on our more conservative stance today, we are starting the year with an expectation for revenue growth in the range of 15% to 17%.

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More calls

Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2025 · 14 pages · Alex Chriss's last full quarter as CEO — the branded-checkout softening that set up the leadership change was already visible here. · Open →

Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2025 · 12 pages · The first read on execution against the February 2025 Investor Day plan, before the year's targets came under pressure. · Open →

Q4 & Full-Year FY2024 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2024 · 11 pages · Where the multi-year Investor Day framework and 2027 outlook — later withdrawn in Q4 2025 — were originally laid out. · Open →

Q2 FY2024 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2024 · 13 pages · Fastlane moving toward general availability and further detail on pricing Braintree and value-added services to value. · Open →

Q2 FY2023 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2023 · 32 pages · Dan Schulman's final earnings call as CEO, just before the handover to Alex Chriss. · Open →

Q1 FY2023 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2023 · 35 pages · Late-Schulman-era cost discipline and operating-margin framing, the backdrop Chriss inherited. · Open →

Q4 & Full-Year FY2022 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2022 · 35 pages · The trough year in full: the cost-cutting response after the 2022 guidance resets and the CEO-succession announcement. · Open →

Q3 FY2021 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2021 · 33 pages · Pandemic-peak growth, when the 750-million-account ambition and super-app strategy were still in full force. · Open →