Get the ball rolling. First of all, thank you again for all joining us. Day two of the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum. Really happy to have a company that we've spent probably way more time on than just one company usually gets in terms of our own energy. We love covering PayPal so much, so much exciting, so many exciting things going on around it. We do a lot of research around it, really happy to have you guys with us. We have John, who's the new Chief Product Officer of the company with us. We have Gabrielle, who's the acting CFO and Investor Relations, and Ryan and the team in Investor Relations and others as well. Guys, thank you all for joining us. Really great to have you. You know, John, maybe just... You just came into this role, what, six months ago now or so?
That's right.
It's not too long ago, but obviously it was a role that I think a lot of investors were eager to see filled, really to understand what you can do and what you're doing to really innovate around the company and help the company progress to the next stage. Maybe before we even get into some of the weeds on this, if you could just give the audience a bit of your background on yourself, your role at PayPal as Chief Product Officer, a little more context.
Yeah, absolutely. My background is, I started off with a very traditional career in banking and consulting. I joined an internet company called Overture, which was, invented paid search. We had no idea at the time that it would be a revolution. We got acquired by Yahoo!, where I ran strategic and product marketing, joined a couple of startups, then ended up becoming Chief Product Officer at Expedia, then President of Vrbo. Back in the day when we bought it was called HomeAway. Then, became President of Platform and Marketplaces at Expedia, then President of Marketplaces. We reorganized around marketplaces. Now I'm here as Chief Product Officer of PayPal. Its My responsibilities include basically helping the merchant side of the business, that business unit, which includes Braintree and Hyperwallet and all of its merchant products, as well as the consumer side, which includes Venmo and PayPal core.
John, just maybe start off by what drew you to PayPal. I'm sure you had a lot of opportunities given your extensive background, so just help us with that first.
There's two main reasons why I joined PayPal. The number one reason is that when you're on the merchant side of the business, PayPal is one of the strongest allies that you have in regards to being able to drive performance for a merchant. By the way, when we had bought Vrbo was really an SEO site, didn't have a lot of commerce capabilities. PayPal was the one thing that all of the employees at Vrbo pounded the table for, because you can't operate a global business without PayPal, especially in Europe, especially in Germany. That was one of the core reasons that we ultimately partnered with them. The other reason at Vrbo was Hyperwallet, the capability to do payouts. It's an incredible capability.
Yep.
What I thought was lacking before I joined.
From PayPal, you mean?
From, yeah. What I thought was lacking at Expedia to join PayPal and what excited me about it was I always felt like they could do more, way more for our business.
Yeah.
When you're running the merchant business, it's kinda lonely, meaning you're trying to crank out conversion, you're trying to crank out performance.
Right.
I always felt like PayPal could be a better partner. You know, some of that now is coming into the DNA in regards to how we approach the merchant business. I've loved the consumer product, but at the time, I didn't know all the things that they could do, and I think there's a real opportunity to bring it all together for consumers.
On that note, I mean, it's been a few months. Just give a little more detail on what you've been seeing and what's the positive surprises, maybe the negative surprises, what you're really excited about also?
Yeah. I'll say the big opportunity in my mind is that PayPal is a marketplace. They have 35 million merchants. They have the 400 million users.
Yep.
It's sometimes hard to figure out what do they do for each other. On the consumer side, are they even aware that we have 35 million merchants? Yeah, they see the convenience of the button everywhere, but outside of that, there's not a lot of value that's being driven to the consumer side. I think the consumers feel it. Other than convenience, they're not getting a lot. There could be a lot more, and I could talk about some of those capabilities.
Yeah.
On the merchant side, I feel the same way, which is they know about the reach, they know about the scale, they love the community, they love the penetration of certain geos. outside of that, what are we providing merchants that we think is that value add? That's the start of the real network effect. In my mind, the real opportunity is over the next year, how do you start to design that? How do you start to put it together? How do both sides of the marketplace really feel it? Then the last leg of that is how does PayPal productize its data so that it's easier and easier to innovate for both sides? Those are really the big themes.
You know, look, checkout experience obviously is a hot topic and, you know, improving or reducing friction around checkout is similarly a hot topic in terms of what could potentially help improve the number of transactions and the competitive dynamics. Just maybe putting it onto your plate now, I mean, what do you see as your priorities? You know, whether it's that or it's just share your thoughts on areas of product side that are top of mind for you and your team. Where have you been spending most of your time since you've been there?
Yeah. on the merchant side of the business in regards to where I spend most time is really thinking about our Braintree.
Okay.
Our products, which is our unbranded Payment Processing. I would say that if you start to think with that unbranded business, most of the solutions, you're really focusing on this authorization rate for the payment. This authorization rate is incredibly important for the merchant because even one dip, it costs them a lot of money.
Yeah.
You're trying to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and ensure that you can improve those auth rates, really lower the overall cost of payment. I think the biggest opportunity is for PayPal to move slightly upstream, where we can impact conversion for the merchant. Now you're talking about hundreds of bits. We've got to really, really just shift our focus from, okay, we've optimized payment stack. Let's move slightly upstream. Let's see if we can help basically optimize the checkout flow, provide way greater value for the merchant.
When you start to think about, like, what PayPal owns as assets, with all of its data, it should actually be able to do a quite a reasonable job, especially for the mid-tier and below, because we have a lot more data we can optimize more effectively, and then we can provide better solutions for our enterprise merchants.
That's on the merchant side, right?
Yeah.
I mean, is that something that you see as having, you know, an ability to tackle in a realistic timeframe or?
Yeah. I'd say actually it's going very well. Last year a lot of the focus is that because Braintree scaled so fast.
Yep.
We had to focus a lot more on stability as, hey, let's just make sure this payment stack is stable. Our merchants can make a decision in real time in regards to how they want to process those payments. If it's that stable, then they can swap that payment traffic over to another provider. That was a real critical focus in regards to making sure that everything is working really, really well. The other thing is just making sure our implementations are designed in a way that as we wanna push out products, we can do it through the existing implementations. That's been a journey. As those things are in place, you can see us drive product much faster because the implementations are already there.
That's helpful on the merchant side. Broadly speaking, I just wanna mention that like over the past several years, there's been a perception that sometimes PayPal could be more quick in their innovation, right? And just progress a little more rapidly in some of the different initiatives you've made. Touch on that for a little bit. I mean, is that something you think you can help with the acceleration of?
Yeah, I think so. I'll talk about two points. Number one is that when you come in an organization like this, and they have two sides of the marketplace, you can't actually do product development the same way. The way that you might think about Braintree and solving a problem for Uber is a very precise exercise. They want this exact same thing to happen. Here's how exactly their technology works. Here's the type of decisions that they want made and where they want it in the payment stack. When it comes to the consumer side, the way to think about it is you don't really know what the consumer wants. You might have ideas, you can test some things, you have to quickly iterate.
I think for PayPal, where I feel like we'll add a lot of value, is that you should have two distinct product development processes and not try to make them the same, and that's a big mistake. We're kinda unwinding, hey, those things should not be the same. We should have different approaches. I think on the consumer side, we can be way more rapid. I think the ultimate thing that does slow you down a little bit, but it's worth it, is just making sure that you're hitting all of your compliance, hitting all of your regulatory requirements. It slows you down slightly, and then as long as you have a framework for that, you have systems that can make that easier to actually execute, it allows to go a lot faster.
Okay. All right. Why don't we shift gears now specifically to checkout and the experience and the friction around it and the possible improvements, which is initiatives that PayPal started before you even came on, I think, right?
That's right.
We've definitely seen some progress. We've actually had FIDO Alliance here yesterday talking about passkeys and how much they see that being adopted in the market, including with PayPal. Maybe you could just help us understand. I mean, what have you seen so far on that front? What kind of progress, in your eyes, are you seeing relative to your initial expectations?
Two things, right? I'll do unbranded checkout, and then we'll do branded.
Sure.
On the unbranded side, I see a ton of progress, which is we're stabilizing this thing. We're winning deals. The quality of the network and the reputation is growing. I feel great about this business.
Yeah. I mean, Braintree's growth rates have kinda spoken for themselves.
It's an amazing property. On the branded side of the business, I think the key is customer engagement. That's really how you drive it. The reason why, I say that is that the PayPal Button is almost everywhere. There's not a lot more merchants to go chase. I mean, right now it's all long tail. If you wanna get further penetration, you have to figure out how do you get in the long tail. Even there, you have big partners like Shopify that solve a ton of problems there. The question is how do you ensure that the consumer chooses PayPal in the checkout, and that you're giving them a good experience, and that you're also providing them value above and beyond just the, "Hey, we're a wallet with sorts of cards." That's just been a big area of opportunity and an area of focus for us this year.
That's the areas you've identified since you've been there, I guess?
That's right. That's right.
Just maybe continuing on that theme since it's so important. I mean, we talked about various initiatives that we're hoping to see improve the actual experience. Latency, I know is a concept that we've talked about a lot with you guys. One-Click Checkout, removing the need to enter your password as I just brought up passkeys before. Help us understand some of those initiatives a little bit further, if you don't mind.
Yeah.
What you're seeing.
It goes back to this idea that we have to move upstream from just basically trying to improve auth rates to helping checkout. The ultimate vision for a checkout is you start to think, what is the simplest way to think about it? Is you really just have to democratize One-Click Checkout for everybody.
Yep.
Right? You have to be able to go to a site and make it as easy as you just have to click this button. There's a lot of reasons to believe that the data that we have, which is we already capture basically your name, your address, your credit card numbers, what your preferences are. The question is, how do we intelligently put that all back in a wrapper so that it's just one- click? That's where it's going, and that's where you can see, hey, you'd improve the merchant performance, not by one dip at a time, but hundreds of dips at a time. That's where we see is a big opportunity and area of focus. You may have heard of accelerated checkout as one of the initiatives.
Yep.
I think, I don't like that name because it doesn't aptly describe all the things that we're doing. I'll give you another example, is part of that in regards to thinking about that overall relationship, we introduced this, a feature called Package Tracking.
What's it called? Package Tracking?
It's called Package Tracking. What we give the consumer an option to do is if they buy something from a merchant, they can say, "Hey, I wanna track that." In the app, we give them tracking notifications where it is in transit. We show it to them on a map, and then we say, "Hey, it's arrived. We tell you that the full time. Merchants love it. Here's the reason why, is because a lot of merchants get hit with a chargeback saying, "I didn't receive my item." Sometimes they receive the item, it's a list of things, and it's only one item t hat they're missing or you put chargeback on the whole thing.
For a merchant, it's incredibly disruptive. With the feature like this, you're now helping kind of chip away at that. You can resolve some of the chargebacks that they're seeing because of that, because you now have a record, you can provide some innovation, which is, "Hey, here's your total receipt. If you didn't receive an item, just get down to the item. Don't do the whole receipt." You can imagine the value add that you provide a merchant's incredible. For the consumer, they love it because this is the convenience. As you go down that theme, there's so many things that we want to do on behalf of the merchant where we can use our PayPal services, our data, and then we provide value adds to both sides of the marketplace.
One-Click Checkout, to me, still seems like it's probably a must, really to compete in this world. I mean, you talked a little bit more about the merchant side and what the merchants love, and to some degree, the benefits to the consumer, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, you know. I mean, is that something that I'm sure a lot of folks in this room are PayPal users, probably most, and what can we as users expect to see tangibly in the next few months?
I think tangibly. So for Package Tracking as an example, you'll see that now roll out. As that rolls out, you'll see a lot of our merchants are interested. You'll see a lot of coverage around that particular feature. For when it comes to One-Click Checkout, I think the way to think about it is you all talked about passwordless. That's the start of it, right? Which is that's one of the more painful steps in the overall checkout process. What's next? You say, "Hey, is the form filled out with all of the correct information?
Yep.
By the way, not, it's not always. Making sure that that is accurate. What's the third thing? Well, do you have a vault of all of the necessary financial instruments to make basically good decisions around how you wanna go purchase? Is there enough of a pattern around that so that I can actually default it to the right things? As you start to think about that One-Click Checkout journey, it's just about going step by step and also in parallel to make sure that all of these things are easier and easier and easier and more accurate, speedier, faster, so that ultimately, oh, it feels like a One-Click Checkout.
In terms of just what I mentioned before, timing and view that you can see some progress tangibly in the next, you know, some point during 2023, what is your confidence around that?
I'd say that this all of these suite of things that we're putting together
Yeah
We've been preparing it, behind the scenes for both basically our unbranded business, how they can push basically this capability, as well as introduce it to new merchants. I'd say that on schedule, we'd say, "Hey, we would love to launch a generally available set of capabilities that, you know, are around this type of framework next year." This year, it's really about piloting and working through all of the kinks around some of these key features to make sure that they're working. So we have a few pilot customers that we're working very closely to say, "Hey, is it everything that you expected? Is there easier ways to implement it? Are we getting all the steps right?" We're being very religious about measuring the performance gains because that's what's gonna sell the product.
I mean, this was a question that we get from clients a lot. Just as you guys are managing your efficiencies and expenses, do you have what it takes? Do you have the resources you need to get this job done in terms of truly doing your job, improving the checkout experience and the experience for merchants?
I'd say that we have most of it, but we do need new talent. I'll tell you where the areas are that we're really exploring and where we need to invest further, is that PayPal has such incredible data.
Yep.
The data is actually not in product form. What I mean by that is that if you start to think about questions of, what do you know about, let's say, a consumer? It's just an example. What would the consumer give you permission to use? Well, that has to all be organized in a way that it's super straightforward, where the user can actually see it themselves, and they can give permissioning in real time. Is that set up? Not yet, but you see the promise of it, which is this could be incredible. You start to look at the merchant side. You have basically the same question, which is: where is all the data that we know about the merchant? What does the merchant actually wanna share with the consumers? What does that relationship look like?
That's the work. When you start to say, "Hey, we could put this stuff into a graph," then it's very easy to see you could drop basically machine learning, AI on top of it and answer some very interesting questions. When I say answer interesting questions, all things commerce could be answered through PayPal eventually, if you start to productize this data, put AI on top of it, and then build experiences that allow basically merchants and consumers to basically interact with their data. That's where I'd say we don't have the capabilities yet, but we have starting to build a vision. We're starting to acquire talent little by little to say, "Hey, we need to architect this solution." Then we need new talent to actually execute against some of the use cases that we want to drive.
On that note, I mean, I wanna talk about different channels because mobile, you know, PayPal's always had a strong presence on desktop, I think, generally speaking, but there's been more questions as more commerce moves to the mobile front. How do you think about designing product experiences for different channels, and how focused are you on driving just greater app penetration? I'd love to hear just how important it is for PayPal app to driving consumer engagement as well.
Yeah. It's critical. By the way, a couple things to note about this is that when you think about PayPal in the past, it's hard to understand where you would drive consumers to try to engage. There's no reason to log into the website, as an example. You use it as a payment vehicle, and then you go to the website, why? You wanna update a financial instrument. Well, that's like a utility. It's very rare that you actually have this need on a day-to-day basis. The app really gives us a surface area where you say, "Hey, we can actually do more for you." We take all this transaction data, provide value-added services. You will see this year, the app will start to introduce one by one new features that we think are very interesting to help you.
One of the themes will be around security, which is, hey, how do we make sure that we keep you safe? How do we make sure that if we know your FIs, that we're also doing something for you on your behalf at all times. Something as small as just searching the dark web to say, "Did we find your credit card? And if we did, how fast can we alert you before anything happens?" These are thematically the type of things that we're exploring as opportunities. Then as you say, "Okay, well, if the app usage is higher, how do you then get better penetration with the merchants?" What the merchants want is they want basically PayPal Checkout as a native SDK.
Yeah.
That basically they can build native experiences. We're rolling that out.
In mobile form as well?
In for the mobile app, for native apps. App developers were able to then build native experiences with PayPal. We think that'll be especially-
That's kind of necessary and probably game changing if you can get it done. That's probably a merchant by merchant initiative, am I right?
That's right. A lot of merchants who have apps, if you think of it in this way, which is, yes, it's merchant by merchant, but there's a big head and then a very long tail, and that very long tail may not have apps.
Right. All right. Let's. This brings me to the next question, which is, you know, when all said and done, you complete your task of making these improvements, what are we gonna see? What are things gonna look like for the consumer, for the user of PayPal, for, you know, in app, in mobile, on desktop? What should it feel like?
Well, one thing that we've been rolling out this year, we have it on Venmo. So this is it's actually a very good analogy, is that we have this feed. Feeds are really interesting. Venmo being one of the few apps with a feed, what they haven't done over the years is that they haven't taken advantage of the main benefit of a feed, which is discovery. You start to say, feeds are meant for discovery. PayPal just introduced it. We need to introduce discovery. You might say, "What is it that you're helping consumers discover?" Well, number one is that we have incredible relationships with small businesses.
Yep.
Where we're seeing payment data, we're seeing activity. We know that there's probably something incredibly relevant for consumers if we just basically put it into the right form to say, "Hey, I don't know if you know this, but your contact, your friends, or what's trending locally is they're using this dog walker, they're using his accountant.
Yeah.
T hey're using this taco stand." I have a friend in Venmo today. She's always eating tacos on Tuesday. I have no idea where she's going. I'm always curious, I end up texting her. The, you know, the insight for me is, we've gotta make this way easier because she's clearly paying somebody, and I would love to see who it is. I think that you'll see as a theme, the experience will be much more discovery-oriented over time. We're already starting those activities.
What we wanna be able to do is for all of your commerce activities, really give all of the tools like Package Tracking, other things like that, where we feel there'll be some value add in regards to, hey, I want to transact using PayPal because of rewards, because of Package Tracking, because of the data value adds that they provide. There's all security. I think that'll be the vision that you'll see, and you'll see a lot of those things roll out this year in regards to experiments that we'll be trying to drive to say, "Hey, have we gotten it right in regards to the type of capabilities that consumers wanna use?
Okay. Discovery is obviously helpful. Just on the experience itself, just to be clear, you know, if we wanna have a One-Click Checkout, is that something you see in the horizon?
Yeah, absolutely. That's all part of this effort that we have on the merchant side. As we build that out, it'll simplify it for the consumer. You could easily envision, hey, if you can simplify it that much, could you distribute it back to, let's say, your app?
Right.
The answer is, yes, of course, you can because you've logged in. If you're in a logged in state, all things are possible. Then the question is, what would we make available through that one- click? That goes back to discovery.
Right
W hich is, what is it that we think is relevant? Those are some of the capabilities we would need to build.
Some of that's gonna take time by nature of working with merchant by merchant.
Okay.
I'm assuming there's the 80/20 rule, right?
That's right. The world is changing fast, meaning a lot of merchants do have this data in a readily available format. The question is, how quickly do you populate all that data with information about relationships as well as what people are buying and the velocity of these things, how fast they're changing?
How about Venmo? It's another area that is clearly something we investors, but just in general, consumers love and use. I think investors in particular were hoping for even more, right? More connectivity and interoperability potentially with Venmo, with other parts of the business, more utilization of it. Can you just touch on what you see and the opportunity there?
Yeah. You hit upon a lot of those, right, which is consumers are asking us for more capabilities.
Yeah.
They've been asking for capabilities on group pay. That's been a big ask, which is, "Hey, can you make it easier for me and my friends to split payments and, you know, split expenses?" Another thing that our consumers have been asking a lot about, well, actually, their teenagers have been asking for is teen accounts. That's something that they've asked for. Then where I see the big opportunity is two things.
One is, you know, we started this program called Business Profiles. We had millions of merchants sign up, millions. Coming in fresh, I actually have no idea why they would sign up because the value proposition is unclear to me. When we ask them, "Why, why is it that you signed up?" Almost all of them say, "I wanted to be discovered." That's a pretty big insight, which is, wow, we could use basically the payment flow to drive relevant experiences.
Yep.
We can provide value add. I think that's a big opportunity for us, which is we've got to go explore the space to see what that might look like. The other place where I think that there's just tons of headroom is Pay with Venmo. The reason why I think that's so massive is that merchants really want it. Two reasons. One is the demographic. They love it. They see this as an easy way to be relevant to a maybe younger demographic that merchants haven't traditionally penetrated.
Number two is that it's an audience that doesn't really use credit cards in the ecosystem. It's really about what they have in their balance and trading it. They see great economics in regards to being able to unlock that. That part we know is crystal clear, is that merchants want it. The question is for the Venmo consumer, why use Venmo to actually then make payments for the different merchants? That will also just be an evolving arena for us in regards to setting up experiments and ensuring that we're building features and incentives t hat encourage them to say, "This is actually a very good way to pay.
Just can we make it a little bit more tangible in terms of Pay with Venmo? Again, it's a topic we've talked about for years, I'd love to hear the tangible, realistic potential for that over the course of the next couple of years and what you see. I mean, is it something that merchants are embracing as they start to see discovery be valuable? What kind of timeline, if you can give us any sense?
I'd say it's an area of focus for us this year. What I mean by that is that if you start to think about how there's lots of merchant partners that want to use it. The way we've reorganized our business slightly in the past 6 months is that the Pay with Venmo capability used to sit with Venmo.
Yep.
Now we're sitting it with Pay with PayPal.
Okay.
The reason why that's a big deal is you need someone to incubate it. Now in order to scale it, the industrial strength where you can hit a lot of merchants, you need the people who've already seen the movie, already worked on it for 15 years, know how to take that and then scale it very quickly. The consumer side, you will see a series of experiments this year to say, "Hey, this is the reason why you want to use Venmo." It'll be thematic, it'll be incentives, as well as, ideas like Buy Now, Pay Later, which is we think value propositions that really drive basically usage.
There probably are. I don't know if you've ever disclosed and don't if you haven't, but there probably are some users of a good number of Venmo users that aren't also PayPal users, right?
That's right. That's right.
That could be a good amount of white space, I imagine. I mean, when thinking about that, you're spending time, it sounds like, both on the merchant side and the consumer side across the platform.
That's right. I'm spending time on both sides, but I'd say that the side that has the most upside in terms of just getting a good strategy is consumer side.
Yeah.
I think on the merchant side, the business is pretty straightforward, which is make a great product, make it incredibly stable, get the latest implementations, push out these products that ultimately we know help the merchants build out features that help the consumers. It's very straightforward. On the consumer side, because a lot of the things that we're talking about, you're not 100% sure if it's gonna work, you have to structure it correctly so that they're not wasting time. I see a lot of upside there and where they just need maybe a little bit more of my help in the short term.
Some of this discussion has obviously come because over the last few years we've seen even more progress by competitors, right? Whether it's, you know, Apple or it's some of the other gateway solutions out there. Maybe help us understand your thought around the checkout and the competitive landscape on checkout and where you guys feel your position now.
Yeah. You know, I'll speak to it from a merchant side first, and then I'll talk about it from a PayPal perspective. Is that from a merchant side perspective, almost everybody fights to add more payment types into checkout. The only people who don't fight for that are the product people, right? The reason why they don't wanna fight for that is that every time you give them another choice, you're declining conversion rate automatically, right? Because now you're just giving somebody a choice and they're like, "Oh, so should I pick a Visa, Mastercard? Should I pick, I'll come back tomorrow. Like, I'll decide, I'll do some research.
Oh, interesting.
They hate that.
You're saying merchants just hate to have multiple checkout options on there.
They don't wanna do that. They want to figure out, how do I optimize this, make this fast. As a secondary thought, they go, "Oh, and then I wanna drive down the cost." There's always tension in regards to how do you do that by also not leave money on the table. Almost all product people are incented to get the conversion, right? Get the conversion because that means money as well as margin, as well as, you know, hitting their objectives in regards to being able to grow their sales. You add all of these things, and I'll give an example. Some of these alternative payments, you know, Buy Now, Pay Later. At Expedia, when we put some of those players on checkout, the problem is, okay, you've given this option.
They say, "Hey, I'm gonna go do this $1,600 vacation." I'm making it up. They say, "I'm gonna go down this path." The first obstacle is, oh, you've been rejected, right? You go, "Oh my God, I just spent all this time and I..." Who do they call? They call Expedia. They don't call the alternative payment provider, and then they yell at you, and then they say, "I hate you. I'm never gonna use you again, blah, blah." You go, "Wow, I just can't believe that that experience was actually created." Well, there's another scenario which is, you go through the effort, you get approved. It's not a $1,600, though, it's $300. You say, "Well, that's useless. Why did you approve me for $300? I want $1,600."
Now again, it's like they don't know what to do other than to call you and complain, and they think that by yelling at you'll approve the $1,600, which we don't have the power to do. As you start to think about those experiences, imagine that's what's happening in those marketplaces. For us, as an example, Buy Now, Pay Later has been a home run. To really make it great, what we really need to do is just pre-approve people, and we need to tell them exactly the amount, and we should share that with you even before you get to the site.
If you have this capability, and if you knew, let's say, that you had a $1,600 capability to buy a vacation on a travel site, well, then there's all that tension is gone, and now you're adding value to the merchant. It's gotta be things like that in regards to the alternative payment space. I think the reason for this drive for One-Click Checkout is because the choices are just growing, and the merchants don't wanna deal with it. They want something to optimize that on behalf of the consumer, and that really needs to be an AI exercise.
Looking ahead, maybe you could just help us understand your goals for PayPal from your seat over the next couple of years now. I mean, you've had the luxury of a whole few months. Nonetheless, based on what you've seen, you know, just what do you want to accomplish over your time as you're with the company, and how do you want us to measure your success?
That's a good set of question. I'd say in terms of my agenda and what we're trying to accomplish is that we're obviously trying to power basically these merchant experiences and these consumer experiences with value add. We wanna make sure that they're adding value to each other. I'd say that the big part of the transformation and why I'm here is I wanna help basically PayPal become a tools company to a data and AI company. All of the things that come with that in regards to optimizing these flows for behalf of the merchant, optimizing the experience for consumers, making sure that our data is in a place where we can help both sides, both sets of consumers and merchants, and that we build experiences that we think are quite algorithmic.
How I measure my success is that, you know, I want to see the activity rate for our users grow year-over-year at a very nice rate. That growth selection, it makes sure that people are using branded checkout. It also means that whatever we're doing in terms of adding value to the consumer through the merchant experience is working. I, you know, I hope that what you see in terms of progress is that you'll see that when we talk about PayPal, that we're talking about conversion lifts and not auth lifts. We think that's the name of the game, and with our data, we can do it better than anybody else. That would be our objective is to build a game-changing product around conversion.
Okay. Thank you very much, John.
Absolutely.
Great to have you with us. It's exciting to see how the things progress. I really appreciate having you. Great to have you meet investors as well.
Thank you so much.