PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Daniel Schulman : Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Jason Kupferberg : Thank you, Dan, congratulations. I wanted to do a follow-up on engagement. I know it’s kind of been a recurring theme on the call. The growth in the payment transactions per active stayed elevated this quarter, 13%. Hoping you can delve into some of the specific drivers, the primary drivers of that and whether you feel it’s sustainable in 2023? Thanks.

Daniel Schulman : Yeah. So I think it’s one of the things that we talked about, which is kind of a new piece of information for us is that nearly half of our base is a monthly active user and about 190 million or so. Those monthly active users, without Braintree in the number, because a lot of people are Braintree in that number, without Braintree in the number, use us 6 to 7 times a month. So they’re transacting 72 to 90 times a year with us. That is up 40% from 2019. It’s up 5% year-over-year. And that — those characteristics of those MAUs is they have an extremely low churn rate. They are extremely engaged, highly satisfied with high and growing ARPU. Our biggest opportunity is to move our active accounts into our MAUs. We generate an enormous amount of organic active accounts.

Enormous. Every single year, they come on to our platform. And they come on to our platform because we’re so ubiquitous. We have coverage across 35 million merchant accounts, 80% of the top 1,500 accounts in the U.S. and Europe. And so they come. They make a transaction, or they get a P2P request, and they — and they do kind of a one and done. And the way that I think about, probably the best analogy between MAUs, monthly active users, and the rest of our accounts is how the wireless industry thinks about postpaid and prepaid. Our MAUs are our postpaid accounts. Again, they’re very satisfied. They have high ARPU, very, very low churn. And they’re engaged in our mobile app. They’re ready to try new services as we put them on. When we put on a new service, when they try on new service, their ARPU goes up by 25%.

And so we are very focused on ensuring that we grow our MAUs and that we take those tremendous organic number of people that are coming on. By the way, with no cost per gross add on that, not CPGA. Like those organic things are coming in, just constantly at the top of our funnel. It’s a bit of a two-edged sword. One, it kind of — it adds to churn, obviously, but churn of a base that’s not transacting at all. But our opportunity is with — as we get a better value proposition, a more compelling proposition across our consumer side as we upgrade our merchants into the best possible checkout experiences that we take those active accounts and move them into MAUs. This whole thing about what’s happening with your churn, what’s happening, that’s a false narrative actually.

What’s really happening is our MAUs are incredibly consistent, staying with us highly satisfied, acting quite a bit and growing. And that’s really where our engagement is coming from. That’s probably — for instance, we have 35 million consumers that use us for subscription management. Every single month, we manage their subscriptions automatically for them, whether they be to Hulu or to other subscription management services. And so those are incredibly sticky high-value customers for us, and we have a ton of focus on moving people to that MAU base, which is why it’s such a focus for us as opposed to net active accounts.

Jason Kupferberg : Understood. Thank you.

Daniel Schulman : Yeah. You’re welcome.

Operator: Our next question comes from Timothy Chiodo from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Your line is open.