Good morning. Let's get started. Welcome to PayPal's Investor Day. It's terrific to have you all here. We've got a great program and a lot of ground to cover, so I'm going to start with a few housekeeping items to start the day. First, we expect the day to go till about 1:00 P.M., and we plan to take a 20-minute break at about 10:30. If you didn't visit our innovation showcase area during breakfast, it'll be staffed during the break as well. In addition, on the tables, please find our safe harbor statement. Please take a moment to review our safe harbor statement, as we'll be making forward-looking statements throughout the day. In addition, at the end of the program, we'll be hosting a Q&A session. Please write your questions down on the cards provided on the table, and we'll be picking them up throughout the morning.
With that, I'd like to bring up Dan Schulman, our President and CEO, to kick off the day.
Hi, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to our second Investor Day. It's so nice to see a lot of very familiar faces and a number of new faces as well, which we look forward to getting to know you over the next quarters and years ahead, because I know you're all going to be long-term shareholders. I know that. Anyway, you saw the agenda very quickly from Gabs. We have a ton that we want to share with you. All the initiatives we have underway, the product and services we're putting out, why we're doing that, and I hope at the end of this, you'll feel the same sense of confidence that we do that we are just at the beginning of our growth as a company.
What we'll do is we'll put all that together, then at the end, John will take all of that, wrap it up, and we will update our medium to long-term guidance for you, which we're really looking forward to doing. You'll see all that. You'll understand why we're putting that out, and I think it'll be a great day for all of us. This is the team that's presenting today. The reason I love these meetings is that we get to showcase our talent as a company. What I really like about this and what's interesting about the speakers that we have today is that they come from different walks. If you look at Bill, Amit, John, Kunze, those all came to us from acquisitions. John was the CEO of Xoom. Bill, of course, all of you know him, the CEO of Braintree.
Amit, the COO of Braintree. You have John Rainey, who we brought in from the outside along with me three or four years ago. Jim, Sri, and Leah, who have been with PayPal for quite some time and know their business, know the industry inside and out. What I really like seeing about this is it's a mix of what's actually going on in PayPal. We really have these teams coming together, working together as one team, focused on being customer champions, and there is a ton of excitement inside the company in terms of what we're doing. If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this is that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of the opportunity in front of us. The world is rapidly moving to digital payments.
Our total addressable market is gigantic, we'll talk about that in a second. We think we have the assets and the talent to take advantage of that. We obviously have tremendous scale right now with over 19 million merchants, some 220 million consumers on our platform. Really importantly, the scope of the services that we're beginning to offer those consumers and those merchants has expanded dramatically as we've moved from being a product company to being a platform company. So we'll talk about that. Why that's so important is that every incremental service we add to a consumer or to a merchant, their CLV or their lifetime value doubles when we do that. Much stickier. CLV goes up dramatically.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the decision to move to Choice, which we made about 18 months ago, I won't ask for a show of hands here how many of you believed in Choice when we had first announced it, but I know there were at least three of you that did. That was probably one of the most significant things we've done as a company in our recent history. Not only did that significantly enhance the value proposition that we gave to consumers, they're more engaged, they're more active, they're spending more, they're calling much less into our service centers as a result of understanding our value proposition. It fundamentally shifted our position in the ecosystem. Many, many competitors or people who were frenemies at the time have become very deep allies of ours right now.
This partnership that we have right now has redefined our competitive positioning, and we are increasingly becoming the digital payments platform of choice for financial institutions, for the networks, for tech companies, and for wireless carriers around the world. Finally, you'll see in the presentation, one of the things that's night and day difference from five years ago is our tech stack. We were a monolithic C++ stack. We would put out maybe one release a month or so. You'll see in Sri's presentation that where we were doing things one time, we're now doing them thousands of times. I don't even know how to put that in percentage improvement, but you'll see from Sri that our tech stack is radically different.
What that's enabling us to do, because we have a service-oriented architecture, we're programming in the latest engineering languages, it's allowed us to bring in the best and brightest product and engineering talent into the company. That is something that we are tremendously fortunate to have. Part of the reason why so many people are attracted to work at PayPal is not just our mission, which I'll talk about, but it's the size of the addressable market that we have. We believe that we operate in an addressable market that is $110 trillion. Any way you look at that, we think our market share is under 1%. When we talk about no one company is going to be the leader in all of this, it's because it's such a massive market. It's massive and it's growing nicely.
Parts of it that are our spot in the market are growing very rapidly. I'll point that out in a moment. This is a huge market, and every one of the services that we're innovating and developing internally, and the acquisitions we do to put and integrate into our platform are done with a purpose. They are done to address a part of this addressable market that we have in front of us. We think we can play in almost every single one of these spaces here, and we're just getting going on that. One other thing I'd point out is that today, there are about three and a half billion internet users. We think if you look out over the long term, that they're going to be about 6 billion internet users in the world, say, in about 10 years' time.
Our long-term aspiration as a company is to have somewhere between 10% and 15% market share of that. We think internally, our goal as an aspiration is to have 1 billion people on our platform over the long term. By the way, we have about a quarter billion today in that area, if you extrapolate out a little bit. In a lot of the markets where we're in, we have larger shares than 10% to 15%, but we think that is a reasonable aspiration for the company to have over the long term. As exciting as this is, and the fact that we're just beginning in our journey along this, is that the places in the market that we play in today are growing the fastest as well. If you look at just global e-commerce trends, global e-commerce today is about 12% of all retail.
As all of us know, the mobile phone is blurring the distinction between online and offline. It's really just creating commerce in general. This study said that in the next four to five years, that will grow by 100% to about $5.6 billion to $6 billion. My bet, if any of you want to take this, but we'll have to be around in 5 years to pay it off, is that that's going to be a much higher number than that. I believe we're hitting a tipping point right now where much of the in-store traffic will move to digital payments going forward. I think that 100% is understated. If you think about what's driving that, it is the mobile phone. Today, $1.8 trillion. In 4 to 5 years, that grows to $4.3 trillion or 75% of the e-commerce marketplace, growing at 135%.
If you look at our results, our mobile growth has been in excess of 50% every single quarter that we've represented that. We're obviously growing faster than the market. Why is that? It is because there is nobody out there that has a better mobile checkout solution than PayPal. Our mobile checkout, thanks to a lot of the work that Bill and his team have done around One Touch, our One Touch mobile checkout is some 80% better than the industry average. 80% better. Think about how much that matters for a merchant and for consumers when you have that kind of differential in your mobile checkout, and when you see how much of commerce is moving to mobile. I think it was three and a half years ago, here in this hotel, down on the opposite hall, I gave my first presentation about PayPal.
I remember two days before that, I had lost my voice completely and somehow struggled through that. The vision and strategy that we laid out then have been reasonably consistent. What I talked about then is that PayPal aspires to be the world's largest open digital payments platform. Now, three and a half, four years ago, that was a hard thing to imagine because we were predominantly a single product company. We really didn't have an integrated platform. As I mentioned, it was pretty much of a monolithic platform. Today, you'll see through all the presentations, and you'll see in my presentation just how much we've evolved to being a platform and a solution to our retailers' problems and their pain points as well as for consumers. We have two segments of the market that we serve.
We serve consumers on one side, our goal there is to look at the 2 billion people that are outside the financial system and give them a full platform to manage and move their money. That we call that democratizing financial services. We think we have a tremendous competitive advantage to do that, to bring those citizens into the digital economy, to afford them the opportunities that all of us have as we move into a digital world. We also are working obviously with banks, financial institutions, for those who are already banked and looking to bring our platforms together to give incremental value to our mutual customers, I'm going to talk about that a little bit more going forward. On the merchant side, it is all about providing an end-to-end, one-stop-shop solution for digital commerce. I'm going to talk about that in our next slide.
Increasingly, retailers are turning to PayPal as a must-have platform in order to compete with the likes of Amazon. This is one of my favorite charts in the whole presentation because it shows you just how much we've evolved as a company. Five years ago, that little PayPal processing checkout with PayPal would've been basically what our offering in the market would've been. It's a strong offering, and it still is a strong offering for retailers. If you look now at the platform and breadth of services that we offer to merchants, it is why they are now increasingly coming to us and having their most strategic conversations with us. Before, when we were selling the PayPal button, it was either to treasury or to purchasing. Today, we talk to the CEOs, CMOs of all the largest mid-size, even small businesses about their most strategic issues.
How are they going to morph into the digital commerce world? How are they going to compete against the likes of Amazon? How are they going to take advantage of mobile? What we have now is a full platform, a full commerce solution for them to write their application on top of our platform, connect into our platform, and then we provide all of these different services underneath, whether it be a full omnichannel solution. It's part of the reason why we bought iZettle, whether it be marketing solutions. We are increasingly not just being a checkout solution, but moving up the funnel and the middle of the funnel to turn prospects into buyers, and to help merchants identify high-value prospects, and then how to convert them into buyers. We are more and more becoming a solutions company, a platform company than a button company.
Same thing is happening on the consumer side. We are offering a suite of services to help people manage and move their money. To me, I think over the next five, maybe 10 years, you are going to see the vast majority of people move to mobile digital wallets and get rid of what we call dead cow wallets. These leather wallets you carry around with you, they will be a thing of the past. People will move to digital wallets. Just like in the physical world, you don't carry around five or six different wallets. You have one wallet. You have many financial instruments inside that wallet. You'll be able to do that through a digital wallet, and you'll be able to not just move your money like you do today in wallets, but manage your money as well.
For those who are underserved, we want to make sure that we have a fulsome platform that allows them to do transactions quickly, to not wait in line to make those transactions, to do them securely, to make sure they're accessible and understandable, and very importantly, that they're very inexpensive. We think we can bring on a tremendous amount of the underserved population and fully provide a platform for them to manage and move their money. For those who are in the banking system today, we are working hand in hand with our partner financial institutions, with the networks, with tech companies to basically take the best of our platform. Many of the financial institutions today think of PayPal as their largest digital distribution channel. Why? Because we drive tremendous growth for them.
We look at the assets they have, like rewards points and that kind of thing, and we think to ourselves, "How can we take the best of their assets, the best of our assets, combine them together into a value proposition for our mutual customers that neither of us could do alone?" If you look at our funds in over here on the left-hand side, you can see rewards points. Later on this year, many of the world's leading financial institutions will begin to put rewards points into our wallet, and you'll be able to take those reward points and basically spend them at any of our 19 million merchants.
That will open up really our platform, which has been a goal of many platforms for a long time, to be a consolidator of rewards points and to enable people to get much more value out of those points than they otherwise could have. We think there's a tremendous amount we can do with consumers. As all of you know, today a PayPal customer uses us about three times a month, a Venmo customer multiple times a week. Our goal is for that to happen 1 to 2 times even daily, because we believe that if you're managing and moving your money on our platform, that's an app that you use all of the time. A lot of people talk about why PayPal. Why are we going to be successful going forward. I think there are all sorts of reasons for that.
First of all, at a macro basis, the payments industry is a very difficult industry to get into. You miraculously need a two-sided network at scale. A lot of people come in with either a lot of consumers, some come in with a lot of merchants, very few with a lot of consumers and merchants at the same time. Scale is incredibly important when you're coming into, but scale on both sides, on the merchant side and on the consumer side. We're fortunate that the network effects right now of having 220 million consumers, 19 million+ merchants, has created a tipping point where for merchants around the world, whether they be in the IR 500 or small businesses, PayPal is a must-have for them. That network tipping point is helping tremendously, as is the scope of the services that we can offer.
We will increasingly offer scope and solutions to our merchants. We subdivide our merchants into different segments. We subdivide our consumers into segments and provide solutions specifically for them. It's important to understand that unlike most other digital wallets out there, we are one of the only ones who fully control the end-to-end value proposition. That's very important to understand because it allows you to do things in your value proposition that others can't do. For instance, we onboard, we then look at a transaction, we have some 9 billion-10 billion transactions we'll do this year. We look at those carefully. We understand the risk associated with that. We allow transactions to go through or block them based on our algorithms, on our machine learning.
If you have a problem, you call us for customer service. Because of that, we can do things like Buyer Protection, which is incredibly important for things like cross-border, where you may not know the merchant, but you want to purchase. It's why 80% of the market would prefer to use PayPal for a cross-border transaction because of things like Buyer Protection. Other companies out there rely on third parties to do the things that I talked about. If you're using, for instance, an Apple Pay, they rely on the banks to do the onboarding, the banks to decide whether a transaction happens or not. If you have a problem, depending on what financial instrument you use, you have to call a different bank or credit union to fix that problem. For us, it's all an end-to-end, we control that value proposition.
Any survey you look at, PayPal, in terms of trust, is one of the top five brands across all financial service and tech players. If you look at us just in general, we are always one of the top 100 brands in the world in terms of our prominence and people knowing of us. Every year, our brand has increased in terms of its recognition. We're one of the fastest-growing brands in the world, according to Interbrand. Depending on the survey, we can be in top 10, top 80, but we are one of the top 100 constantly in every survey, and always one of the most trusted. When you talk about being a fintech player, different people emphasize different parts of it. There are people who emphasize the technology part. There are people who emphasize the financial services part.
The truth of the matter is you have to be world-class in both. When you're a financial services player at the scale we are, fraud, risk, security, enterprise risk, compliance, AML, FinCEN, all of that is absolutely essential for you to be a world-class company and for you to scale and to operate in 200 countries around the world. It's a huge moat for us. We've been doing this for 20 years. We have incredibly sophisticated algorithms, very sophisticated models that allow us to do this better than anybody. Our 19 basis points of loss for online is world-class out there. So we feel really good about this, and we are radically improved from where we were four years ago on all elements of this.
I've talked about our open tech platform already, and we're going to hear a lot more about our revamped tech stack, but these are all incredibly important value differentiators for us. Most importantly is this is not a side hobby for us. We have 20,000 people in our company. All we focus on is digital payments. That is it. We have thousands upon thousands of engineers, product managers that just focus on digital payments. This is our passion. It's what we do, and we spend, well, practically 24 hours a day thinking about it. These are the results that come by being focused, by having differentiation.
Over the last three years, despite tons of competitive announcements that have come out, and I hope you can understand now, seeing the rest of this, why those competitive announcements don't impact our growth going forward, is whether it be customer metrics or our financial metrics. Over the last three years, we've increased all of them substantially. Just as importantly, we take our commitments to all of you very seriously. We put a ton of time and thought and analytical rigor into the guidance that we provide. We try to be relatively accurate on it. We don't want to say we're going to be here and come way up here. We try to be accurate, but we know how important our word is to you.
Look, the future is always inherently an uncertain place, but we work very hard to be sure that we can meet our commitments to you when we provide our guidance. I want to wrap up by just saying three things. One, I hope you agree at the end of the day that we're just beginning on this journey. We feel by far and away the best days of PayPal are ahead of us. Two, we have a unique set of assets, talent, scale, and importantly, financial flexibility to be able to not just stay a market leader, but to widen our position as the market leader in digital payments. I think you'll see from everybody that comes on stage here, it's a team that is quite passionate about its mission, about serving our customers, and very importantly, about delivering on our commitments to all of you.
Thank you very much, and let me bring up Bill. Yeah.
All right. Good morning. As you just heard from Dan, we think we have some pretty amazing opportunities in front of us, and we're excited to get to have the day with all of you to share them with you. We think that there's a huge market out there that is growing rapidly. There's a real opportunity for PayPal to become an iconic company for the next decade and beyond in the way that we can go serve that market. When you think about companies that manage to do something that is truly iconic and enduring, they tend to have something distinctive they do that others can't easily replicate, and they're offering those things at a moment in time when those services are really needed and aren't able to be provided by others. What is that for PayPal?
What is that thing that is distinctive for PayPal? What is that moment in time for us? As you heard Dan talk about, our two-sided platform, our ability to connect consumers end-to-end is truly distinctive. PayPal is the only player in the payments ecosystem that operates on both the consumer and merchant side of the payments landscape and is able to connect the experience end-to-end and do so at scale around the world. Which means that there's things we can solve that others just can't. You may see people who do pieces of that are on the consumer side, but not the merchant, on the merchant side, but not the consumer, or maybe they're on both sides, but can't control the end-to-end experience, or they're on both sides, but they're geographically constrained, and they don't operate around the world.
When you say, "Who can operate on both the consumer and merchant side of the payments ecosystem, control that experience end-to-end, and do that at scale around the globe?" PayPal is the company that is doing that. That really matters because as you heard Dan alluding to, there are huge changes afoot. If you're a consumer, you've moved to mobile as your primary computing device. You're spending the majority of time on the mobile device. Yet, you don't yet have the majority of commerce happening on the mobile device. You would expect that over time, commerce should happen where people spend their time. Why isn't commerce happening predominantly on the mobile device today? Because there's too much friction involved. It's too hard to get access.
Our two-sided platform, our ability to deliver those end-to-end experiences, lets us solve that for consumers in ways that others cannot. On the merchant side, if you're the CEO of a major retailer, you wake up every morning and think about, "What am I going to do about the fact that a couple large e-commerce companies are really, really taking share in the space, and how do I go compete in a digital world for customers? How do I go compete for customers when they're demanding seamless buying experiences that they can get to things on a mobile device in a matter of seconds?" If you're a small business, you're thinking about, "Well, there's an explosion of places to sell, but how do I connect to all those places to sell?
For both large merchants and small businesses, you're thinking about, how do I bridge that gap to meet my customers where they are? My customers have moved to mobile, this totally new channel for me. How do I meet them where they are? This is the place where PayPal uniquely stands in. We're going to talk more about that. Let's dive into the merchant side of that. You heard Dan talk about the digital commerce platform that we now deliver. Certainly, at the core of that is the PayPal-branded buying experience. We have become a full merchant services provider, offering a number of solutions across the range of things that a merchant would want to become a digital commerce platform, an operating system for digital commerce.
Importantly, as you look at each of these things, one, we're doing them at scale, we're doing them around the globe, every single one of them is enhanced by our two-sided platform. Even when we do things like risk services or invoicing or these types of things, it's enhanced by the consumer side of our business. Even when you're consuming something like risk services from us, it's the fact that we know not just the 237 million users that are on our platform, we've seen nearly every bad actor out there. We have a tremendous network effect in the way that we can deliver the rest of these services that sets us apart from other players in the merchant services business that generally have very little idea how to play on the consumer side.
Yet we bring that information from the consumer side of our business into all these offerings that we bring to the merchant services space. As we've gotten into those, it's not just that we're competing side by side with other players that have been in merchant services for a long time, it's that we're able to bring something new, something different. The most differentiated thing is that in a world of merchant services, businesses that oftentimes are just sort of selling access to undifferentiated dial tone effectively, we're selling access to customers. We're playing a fundamentally different sport than others that you would see in the merchant services space.
Even as we're offering things that may look like what others in the merchant services space do, we're playing a fundamentally different sport because not only do we connect customers into those merchants, but we use our ability to understand the consumer to enhance all these different value props. Whether it's things like our risk services or invoicing, where you can send an invoice with others as well, but when you send an invoice with PayPal, you're going to get paid by more people, get paid faster because we bring that consumer side of the value proposition. You can offer private label credit separate from PayPal, but when you do it with PayPal, we're going to have consumers that we can bring into that in a single touch. This operating system for digital commerce really matters.
At a moment in time when you have small businesses all the way up through large retailers, really trying to figure out how they compete in a digital world, we're giving them the tools to go compete. We're democratizing access to the things that had previously been the exclusive domain of only a few major e-commerce companies, we're taking fire from atop the mountain and giving it to the masses so that everybody can go compete in this world, and we're using our two-sided platform to do that. Let's talk about what's happening on the consumer side of this. If you're a consumer, as I mentioned earlier, you've moved to mobile as your primary computing device, and that's not just in developed markets like here in the U.S. or Europe. If you're in developing markets, you didn't move to mobile as your primary computing device.
Mobile is your first computing device. You are native mobile from the very beginning. As a consumer, you're spending majority of your time there, but you don't yet have all the commerce services that you want there. For that, we have expanded to say, how do we give great access to digital commerce experiences to consumers on mobile devices or however it is that they're going to go meet a merchant? We do that through great checkout services, things like PayPal One Touch. There's now 96 million+ consumers and over 9 million merchants, the most rapidly adopted product in the history of PayPal, and far outpacing other new entrants that you've seen come into the digital wallet space. We're also giving One Touch access to brand new buying experiences. We're giving great access to person-to-person payments.
As Dan mentioned, we're giving access to go pay with reward points at millions of merchants. Things that you previously would have seen, again, only at a few of the biggest merchants. Now you can do that everywhere. We're giving instant cash out to cards. These are all huge parts of the digital commerce experience that we're taking to consumers, so that when you're a consumer and you're going across the digital landscape, PayPal is your best way to access all the best new commerce experiences that are available to you. On top of that, there's a whole group of people that are either unbanked or underserved, that if you don't have a debit card or a credit card, you're locked out of the digital economy, and that's billions of people around the world.
We've now also turned our sights to say, well, for those that have a debit and credit card, we're going to give great access to how to use those in a digital world. For those that don't have that, we're going to help to bring them basic financial services so that they can now be full participants in the digital economy. We think that tremendously expands the market available not just to us, but to our merchant partners and the many partners that we work with. How does that come together for the two-sided platform and the flywheel effect there? The ability to go connect consumers and merchants across these is really at the core of these things. When you have scale, you talk about this as a network effect. It's consumers want to be where merchants are, merchants want to be where the consumers are.
Because consumers see PayPal as the drop-dead simplest way to access all these great new experiences Consumers are demanding that PayPal is how they want to go pay. It's how they want to access these experiences because consumers are there, merchants are coming and saying, "Okay, PayPal is, of course, the way I'm going to go connect with these consumers." If you're at scale, that's a network effect, and it's a flywheel, and it really enhances our value to each of those constituents. If you're sub-scale, that's called a chicken and egg problem.
This is really difficult to replicate, and it's why you see many players try, and they'll get pieces and parts of it, but you can't get the whole thing because consumers look at something new and say, "Well, how many places can I use it?" If the answer is not many, you don't get a lot of consumers signing up. Merchants look at something new and say, "Well, how many consumers do you have?" If the answer is not many, merchants don't want to sign up. This is why you've seen us significantly outpace the many new offerings that have been out there in terms of bridging the gap between consumers and merchants in the world of mobile, and why we're doing that with such pace.
Importantly, as we do that's added another element to what we do in that two-sided platform, that many of the players that people might have thought of as competitors to PayPal three years ago when we first spun out as an independent company, many of those players that were thought of as competitors have now become our partners. What are those players looking to do? They're looking to go create great new digital commerce experiences. As they do that, they've had some of their own direct efforts in that. They've surveyed the landscape, and they've seen that PayPal is doing that better than anybody else out there. That's enabled great ability for us to partner closely with others.
As we bring more partners in, that only enhances the value we provide, that consumers increasingly see more and more that all the best places to get great next-generation commerce experiences, PayPal is the best way to access those. Merchants see that all the new places they can sell, PayPal is the easiest way to get to those places to sell. Both of those constituents see that when they meet one another in a new context, when a consumer meets a merchant in a social news feed or on an Instagram feed, that they know PayPal is going to bridge the trust between them because we're providing Buyer Protection, we're providing Seller Protection. These are the types of things that you don't get if you're just doing one little slice of the value chain, but not controlling the end-to-end experience.
Those partners, they span for us technology platforms and banks, networks, issuers. Technology platforms, as I mentioned, they're thinking about how do they create all these great new experiences? How do they create all these interesting new contexts where buyers and sellers will meet one another? We're working closely with them to help bridge that connection, to go create that trust, to go create that great experience. We'll talk more about some of those. With banks, networks, card issuers, we've started to work very closely there as well. As Dan mentioned, if you're a card issuer, all the growth is in digital. There's been much discussion of how physical world retail is flat to declining. Well, where do card transactions happen? They historically happen mostly in the physical world. Well, if that's flat to declining, where's all the growth?
All the growth is in digital. At $450 billion plus of volume last year, we're arguably bringing more digital to those partners than anybody else could. Even if those are a scale of note, we are clearly a partner to those banks and card issuers and networks, versus you see others that have scale increasingly looking to impede on their turf. As others are encroaching on their turf, we're reaching out a hand to partner to help bring them into those digital experiences, so that if you're a card issuer or a major network, you know that PayPal is going to be a great partner to you to make sure that you're present and available and getting great access to serve your customers in a digital environment. A few examples of that.
On the technology platform side, Google and Facebook are two companies that we partner with closely. We've launched a number of experiences with those. We're going to talk more deeply about each of those, and of note, it's about how do we go enable great new experiences for customers on those platforms. There's different focuses for each of those, but the common thread is that we're able to go bridge that connection between buyer and seller when they meet one another in a new context. Whether it's a social news feed or buying digital content, we're bridging that gap in ways that others cannot. Across the bank and network ecosystem, you've seen us partner with Visa and Mastercard and major card networks. You've seen us do that around the globe.
You've seen us start to work with the biggest card issuers out there, and we're continuing to do that. We're launching more and more new things with the major card issuers that you know here in the U.S., but we're starting to do that around the world. Let's go a little bit into one of those partnerships with Google, and we're going to talk about a few examples of how we bring that flywheel effect, that two-sided platform to life. We're not going to go through all the examples. We'll pick a few just to really make it tangible so that this isn't just hyperbole, that this becomes very clear as to how we're doing this.
Google, for a while, we've been working together on Google Pay, where we announced a while back that you could use PayPal as a funding instrument in Google Pay, and that would allow you to use Google Pay and PayPal to tap to pay in store. It was also the case that we were bringing those users that had linked Google Pay and PayPal to PayPal's millions of merchants and really expanding the ability for a Google Pay user with PayPal to go pay across our millions of merchants. Before I go further into this, we actually have some new news that we're announcing with Google today. We've seen great results from that, and we're significantly expanding our partnership with Google such that you will now, when you link PayPal into a Google experience, you'll be able to use that across Google's many different assets.
For example, if you link PayPal into Google Pay, it's not just that you can use that to go do a tap-to-pay purchase in store, you'll be able to use that when you're buying digital content on Google Play, or if you're doing a P2P transaction in Gmail or anywhere that you would engage with a commerce experience within Google, PayPal is going to be there and available for you. That's a meaningful expansion of our work with Google, that now you'll be able to use PayPal across Google's many properties and assets. When we give that seamless access for a user into that first commerce experience inside of the Google ecosystem, right away, that user's now seamlessly able to engage across all of those.
That maybe I came into that linking PayPal with Google Pay for a tap-to-pay transaction, but when I go put on my new Google VR headset and I decide to go buy some digital content, I'm not typing in a user ID and password. I'm not entering a card number. I'm pressing a button, all of a sudden, I can watch the movie I wanted to watch or play the game I wanted to play without having to do anything additional. That's an example of how we can go bridge that gap between buyer and seller, how we can bring people into great new commerce experiences in super low-friction ways. Of note, when that happens, the consumer knows they're protected, even though it was a drop-dead simple transaction that they didn't have to go enter a user ID and password.
They didn't have to provide extra information. The consumer knows they're protected. The seller knows they're protected. We're giving both seamless access as well as protecting both sides of the transaction. Let's go a little further into exactly how that works. This is an example of adding PayPal into Google Pay. Of note, on a mobile device, on a tiny little touch screen, people don't want to sit there and tap out a 16-digit card number and an expiration date and, "Oh, give me that 3-digit code on the back of it, and then give me a shipping address and a billing address." This is the experience to go add PayPal into Google Pay. The thing to note, zero typing. Couple taps, you're done, PayPal's loaded.
You're ready to now engage in all those great experiences across the Google landscape because of the partnership between PayPal and Google Pay and how that's creating great new commerce experiences across the Google ecosystem. This is an example of how you could further use that. You can use all your different funding instruments inside of PayPal, so choice is absolutely there. You can also use it in P2P, as I mentioned, and see the different transactions you've conducted across those experiences right inside of Google Pay. Google Pay and PayPal, it's very clear to the user how Google Pay and PayPal are working together to make that happen.
You'll see this really start to enhance things that we can do, not just in the Google assets themselves, but how we do things in a Chrome browser, how we do things even beyond, say, the Android operating system, that as those services become embedded in things like the Chrome browser, PayPal is there and available and ready to use right away because we're engaging with Google on how to do those things with the operating system and browser capabilities that they have so that we're working together to go light up great seamless commerce experiences. Let's move into another partnership. With Facebook, we have a number of things that we do with Facebook. We're a primary payment platform for Facebook across many experiences. You can use PayPal to go pay for ads in Facebook. You can use PayPal to pay for goods inside of Facebook.
You as a seller can use PayPal to come and sell on the Facebook platform. We're a primary payment provider, both PayPal and Braintree, across Facebook on a number of fronts. A specific area we're going to delve into is what we're doing with Facebook on Messenger. We announced a while back that you could link PayPal and Facebook accounts, and that would allow you to interact with PayPal over Facebook Messenger. This is an example of that experience. Again, just as I said before, to go link those accounts, zero typing. No user IDs and passwords, no typing, tap a couple buttons, and you're done.
Because of our ability to go secure the user without having to require those things, because of the two-sided platform that allows us to understand how users behave across different contexts, we're able to light that up without the extra friction of a user ID and password or even of biometrics. A couple taps, and you've linked your PayPal and Facebook accounts. That makes PayPal a funding instrument across Facebook experiences, but it also makes Messenger a communication channel for PayPal as we want to go interact with users.
We've had more than five million users come into this experience where they've said, "I want to use Facebook Messenger as the way that PayPal communicates with me." Of note, as we do that, when we communicate with users over Facebook Messenger, it's not just that they can now use PayPal across other places where they would have transacted in the Facebook ecosystem. When we interact with those users, we're able to provide customer service right inside of a chat session. Through bot functionality that we have built on top of the Facebook Messenger platform, we're able to service things that are way beyond just a hello world type of functionality.
This is if people have questions about a refund, a dispute, they want to reset a password, significant issues that you would think would be quite difficult to serve, we're actually serving quite well in a fully automated context, but right where the user is spending their time. We're meeting the users where they spend time. That opens up other possibilities for us as those users start to engage in commerce experiences inside the Messenger context, whether that's P2P, as the example here would show. You can use PayPal to do P2P transactions inside of Facebook Messenger.
The things that we're powering with our tokenization platforms, with the things we do with Braintree that we'll talk about a little more later, if you and I were having a chat inside of Facebook Messenger and talking about the great Beyoncé concert that's going to happen, and we wanted to go get tickets to that. We could go buy tickets from Ticketmaster right inside of that Facebook Messenger context because of the tokenization services that we're providing. Again, an example of buyer and seller meet one another in a whole new context, but instead of that being awkward and full of friction and people having to go enter in a lot of new information, that's a One Touch transaction.
They're able to transact seamlessly. A seller is able to meet a buyer wherever they are, and a buyer is able to engage with great new commerce experiences wherever it is that they encounter them because of PayPal. This is an area across each of these that we've partnered more and more over time, and we think there's a lot more that we can do together as we work together with major tech platforms to light up great new commerce experiences and make sure that we're helping their users to be ready to transact across all the many different properties and assets they have as they're launching new product and commerce experiences. Let's shift a little bit to how we perform. Again, I said I wanted to make this tangible and real and not just hyperbole.
I think in the world of tech, and especially amongst entrepreneurs, sometimes it's hard to discern between what's sizzle and what's steak. How much of this is sizzle and how much steak is there? We talked about how differentiated these services are. This is a Comscore study. It was across 1 million users, a pretty wide panel. They found on those that of that panel, 55% made more online purchases because of PayPal One Touch. 47% made more online purchases just because PayPal is offered. Even if it wasn't One Touch, 47% made more purchases because of that. This last point is really interesting. You have a full 30% plus that just won't transact if PayPal's not there.
It's just not worth the hassle because they know that the majority of merchants out there are now offering great One Touch buying experiences with PayPal. Now, when a consumer shows up someplace and PayPal's not available, they're starting to say, "It's just not worth the hassle. I'll go with someplace that has it," which really, truly makes PayPal a must-have buying experience for both the consumer and the merchant. You see that reflected when you further dig into, well, what are our conversion numbers? That's the survey of those users, sort of what the users are saying they do. Well, this is a measure of what users actually are doing.
Not just what they say they'll do, but what they actually do, which is conversion rate, the percentage of users that have placed an item in a shopping cart, they've gotten to the payment page, and there's nothing left to do except to pay. How many of those actually complete the purchase versus how many abandon? Those that complete the purchase, that's the conversion rate we're talking about here. PayPal converts at nearly 90%. When you look at that for the checkout experience overall, absent PayPal, it's less than half the time that that user would convert. If you're the CEO of that merchant, you're thinking about my consumers are coming to me in different contexts. They're coming to me on mobile.
More than half the time, even when I got them all the way to putting an item in the cart, all the way to the checkout page, more than half the time, it's too damned hard to finish and they just bail out. Of note, even with other new digital wallets that have come in, it's still almost half the time people bail out, versus with PayPal, nearly 90% of the time, they're going to complete that purchase because the consumer knows they can press a button and they're done, and we're going to have all the different ways they want to pay. We're going to have the different places they want to ship to. The consumer knows that they're guaranteed. The merchant knows that they're protected from fraud, that's why you see nearly 90% conversion from PayPal.
This is the kind of experience that when we say we want to go democratize access for retailers, for small businesses, for a vibrant, thriving retail landscape to have the access to the capabilities that were previously the domain of only a few large e-commerce companies, this is the thing that we're making available to everybody. It's not just the 96 million consumers that are on PayPal One Touch, it's 9.1 million merchants. You hear us talk a lot about next generation commerce companies, the Ubers and Airbnbs and Facebook and Google and Snapchat and these kinds of companies that we power and work with on the commerce front, we're taking this to everybody. This is just a sampling of some of the merchants that we've brought on board in the last 18 months.
As you look across these, it's not even just e-commerce companies, not even just physical retailers. You're starting to get into B2B services. You're starting to get into a broad array of all the different places people are conducting commerce, that all of them are seeing that the customer's on the mobile device and PayPal bridges that gap in ways that no others can. It's why we have 79% of the Internet Retailer 100 now offers PayPal One Touch. We see that growing significantly, not just across large retailers, but across small businesses as well. Let's shift into another way that we spin that flywheel. How is it that we're bringing more into that equation of connecting consumers and merchants together, buyers and sellers together? With P2P, I'm sure everybody's thinking about, okay, P2P, we're going to talk about Venmo.
We are going to talk about Venmo. Before we talk about Venmo, it's appropriate that Venmo has become one of the most beloved apps of the millennial generation. Of note, PayPal's P2P business outside of Venmo is actually much larger than Venmo. PayPal has a huge P2P business that is international, and quite a significant part of how we bring consumers into our two-sided platform and bring those to merchants. In fact, one-quarter of all new PayPal consumers come through P2P. When you see how PayPal's consumer growth rate has accelerated, a quarter of those new users are coming through P2P. Again, there's more of that P2P happening on PayPal-branded platform even than Venmo. When those users come in, two-thirds of our most highly engaged consumers are also using P2P.
Those people who come in through P2P, they become two times more likely to use PayPal at checkout. When you think about how do you go monetize that across these different contexts, there's an amazing halo effect of one, P2P feeds the flywheel and brings consumers into these experiences, we've had tremendous success bringing those consumers from a P2P experience into commerce experiences. In fact, PayPal started as a P2P company, P2P only. The first PayPal transaction ever was beaming money between two PalmPilots. It was a P2P company that went from P2P into online commerce, connecting buyers and sellers. That's one of the things that we've really focused on of late is using P2P as an accelerant to that flywheel and how we bring consumers into these great experiences.
Let's go through a few of the different ways that we do that, because I think people may not be fully aware of all the different ways we do that. This is what people would think about when they hear P2P. This is using PayPal for a friends and family transaction. This is you're paying your friend back for your share of the bar tab. You're going to go use PayPal friends and family to do that. It's also the case that over the course of last year, we've added the ability to cash that out instantly for a nominal fee, and we've seen tremendous growth in that, and it's a good example of how we partner with card issuers and card networks to go bring forward the value props that they offer.
As you heard from Dan earlier, that we're working with those card issuers and networks to make it such that you can cash out within seconds to your Visa and Mastercard debit card across nearly all the issuers on their platforms. On top of that, this is an area of P2P that I think is often not fully understood. A lot of the P2P transactions that happen are between individuals, but for some element of commerce. It's I'm buying concert tickets from somebody, or it's a small seller on Instagram that's posting photos of sort of the handmade goods that they have, and they're selling things person to person, but it's actually a commerce experience.
This is when you hear about new entrants to the space, you hear about how there's a lot of fraud happening, a lot of people that are upset because, oh, well, I didn't get the thing I paid for. Oh, I don't have any recourse. Who's going to cover that transaction for me? Oh, I didn't know it wasn't covered. PayPal stands in to go protect the buyer and the seller on those transactions. That's a big part of our P2P business for PayPal. It's a natural segue into the fact that these P2P users then end up becoming two times more likely to use PayPal at checkout.
This now, as we shift gears and come to talk about Venmo and how we're monetizing Venmo, there's certainly elements of Venmo that are unique. This creates a clear roadmap for how do we think about monetizing those P2P users inside of Venmo because we're not creating it anew. We're actually following a well-worn path that PayPal has already been down. We're following that same path for Venmo, even though there's some very unique things we can do with Venmo and the social elements there. As we move into these experiences, as everybody knows, one of the things that makes Venmo quite distinctive within the PayPal family and, broadly is the social element of Venmo, that it's become one of the most beloved apps of the millennial generation because it's where their friends are.
It has changed a lot of the painful experiences that they had around shared transactions. The millennial demographic is a demographic that is about experiences over things. Experiences tend to be shared. That means much more of the expenses and transactions are shared. Having a place where not only you can talk about those things, you can split those transactions with people, right? If a group of us go have dinner, maybe one person picks up the check. We're all okay with that. We'll sort of catch each other the next time. If you just got out of college and you've got a whole lot of student debt and you go to dinner with five of your friends, you need to get paid back. That matters tremendously to you.
That social aspect of Venmo, this both the conversation as well as the ability to easily split transactions, is huge for the millennial demographic. What do we do with that? There's a lot that we think we can do beyond just the transaction itself. You see, as we've opened up new experiences with Venmo, we have made sure that we keep the social element of that you see in Venmo, people are talking about the experiences they had with their friends. They want to talk about the great restaurant they found the night before. They want to talk about the cool boutique that they found, something they think their friend might like to shop there too.
Interestingly, that's a very high fidelity signal to a user that what's more powerful as a signal to me as a user of what I might be interested in, where I might like to buy something, than where one of my friends bought something. It's a very powerful signal. As we've brought commerce experiences into Venmo, we've made sure to keep the social element of that. You see as people are starting to engage with that, these are some social feeds of people commenting on those new experiences. Consumers are really, really enjoying the new experiences we've brought, and we've made sure to bring those in a way that Venmo isn't just another buy button for them.
It's a seamless transaction where they can split the tab, they can share, they can talk about these things, which is the thing that has made it such a great experience for those users in the P2P format. We're bringing that to the commerce format as well. Let's go through some of the specific experiences within Venmo. We started by taking Venmo to PayPal merchants and making it such that every merchant that had PayPal could accept Venmo, and they didn't have to do work to get it. Venmo users don't have to go through some extra setup to get it. There's over 2 million PayPal merchants here in the U.S. that are now accepting Venmo, and those include huge brands.
You can use Venmo to pay on Target and Walmart and nearly every place you would see PayPal, you can use Venmo to go pay in those places. On top of that, we've added the ability to go split and share those transactions so that when you do have one of those that one person picked up the tab or one of the roommates made the Grubhub order for dinner that night, they're not going and doing a separate transaction. They're able to just take that transaction and automatically split it right within the transaction between all their friends that need to pay them back. We've also added a thing that we internally talk about as Smart Payment Buttons, and this is the ability for any merchant that is now integrating PayPal.
The PayPal button is dynamically presented, that means we're also dynamically presenting Venmo buttons as well, so that when a Venmo user shows up to these merchants, they'll see a Venmo button, a clear indication that they can pay. Initially, we launched it across the 2 million PayPal merchants. A Venmo user knew that they could go click wherever they saw PayPal, they could use Venmo. Increasingly, you're seeing merchants say, "Oh, if I can make just a very small change, I can dynamically present a Venmo button to a Venmo user and make it even more likely that I engage with that coveted millennial demographic," they're really, really excited about doing that, and we've had great brands already that have started to do that. We talked about last earnings call, Williams-Sonoma and their family of brands.
Certainly, apps like Grubhub and others are doing dedicated Venmo buy buttons. This is both next-gen commerce apps like a Grubhub, Seamless, Eat24, as well as major retailers like a Williams- Sonoma, Pottery Barn, these kinds of places. That brings you into dedicated apps or native mobile apps that are seeing fantastic engagement with Venmo users, like the Grubhub example that I just gave. As you look across the Braintree ecosystem, that tends to power many of the most noteworthy mobile apps out there. We see really great engagement from those native mobile apps that are wanting to bring a dedicated Venmo buy button into that. Interestingly, just as you would imagine, food ordering is a great repeat activity that really habituates users.
We're not only seeing that many of those native mobile apps want to go engage with Venmo, we're seeing that the ones that have some of the best repeat usage, some of the best habituating experiences, are really excited about engaging with Venmo. So you'll see more of that to come because we really, really feel great about the pipeline of merchants that we have coming into that. In addition to that, just the P2P experience itself, we have expanded significantly. Instant Transfer that I talked about for PayPal P2P, we've also made available inside of Venmo, and we've seen great uptake on that. We're making that available for a nominal fee of $0.25, users are quite willing to pay that fee, and that's a nicely monetizing transaction for us. We have nice margin on that transaction, and it's seamless for the user.
It's also the case, we talked about how much retailers really want to go get access to this millennial demographic. We're bringing new and interesting ways for those retailers to connect with Venmo users. This is an example of some co-marketing with Anthropologie. We have a lot of desire for these things across the merchants that we're working with. We think there's much more we can do there, we've been in pilot on a Venmo card. We talked about for those unbanked users that may not have a debit or credit card. We see those on Venmo as well. We've been testing a Venmo card. We'll bring that to many more users very soon. Then you get to, okay, well, we've really, really just started to launch these things at scale. How's that going?
I think as we move into some more information about that, keep in mind, this is sort of a freemium-type product. How would you typically think about what is success for a freemium model? Oftentimes, for a freemium model where you have many users that are free and a small portion pay to actually monetize the overall experience, you would often see 10% would be a great place to get to if you're providing a freemium service. Well, even in just the first few months that we've really had these things at scale, in the first few months, Venmo is already well past 10% of users engaging in a monetizable experience. So we're at a place now already just a few months into having this basket of services available to Venmo users that 10% plus are now generating revenue for us.
Obviously, we expect there's a lot more of that to go. We think this is something that, unlike other freemium models that would be quite content if you got to 10% or 20% of users, we think this is something that is very broadly applicable, and that's why you see such tremendous growth as we've now really opened this up to the broad base of users over the last few months. A couple more places that we'll talk about that really spin the flywheel. Partners and marketplaces. One of the most interesting phenomenons recently has been that as a small seller, a decade ago, there was one place you could sell online, and that was it. Over the last decade, though, there's been an explosion of places you can sell online.
PayPal is there to help those sellers across as many places that you can sell online. This is really one of the core premises of PayPal spinning out of eBay, that it didn't make sense for PayPal to be wedded to only one of those places that a seller could sell online, but that we could go serve the whole world of places that sellers were now able to go provide their services online. We, nearly three years ago, took a step of separating from eBay. We had an operating agreement in place that created a path for us to further separate those services. You saw us recently take another step on that where eBay continues to be a great partner. We renewed the branded part of that business, which is the vast majority of the volume.
We also let go part of that business because we wanted to be unrestricted in our ability to go serve the rest of the ecosystem and all the other marketplaces and places that small businesses can go sell. I think over the last several months, we've heard a lot about, well, if you gave up a small slice of that eBay traffic, well, what are you getting on the other side of it? What is that opportunity on the other side of it? The interesting thing that I'm going to share a little more about is that we've been working on that already. That was the premise of us spinning out from eBay. We've been building a tremendous business serving all the places a small business might now go sell.
That business of places that small businesses can go sell outside of eBay in the last 12 months was over $65 billion of volume. Of note, that's more than we did for eBay in the last 12 months. Where do you find the next eBay? We've already found the next eBay. Again, to be clear, eBay is still a great partner of ours. We continue to work closely with them. We're committed to their success. That's why we re-up the branded part of the relationship. We're already doing over $65 billion of volume with all the other places a small business can sell. Of note, that for us is growing at 42% year-over-year. Even on a huge denominator like that's growing at 42% year-over-year versus our eBay business that for many years has been a single-digit grower.
We now have a business that is bigger and growing at 42%, many multiples of what our legacy eBay business is. Again, we're committed to the success of eBay, but we're committed to the success of our small businesses and the many, many places they can sell. Of note, the restrictions that we had, we've been able to do this even under the restrictions we had with the operating agreement. As those restrictions fall away, we think there's even more we can do to fully serve small businesses and fully serve all the different marketplaces and all the different partners where those small businesses want to sell. This, by the way, I should note, this is just for the top 20. This isn't even the full business there.
This is just for our top 20 partners, and these are some of the representative examples of those top 20 partners. Just the top 20 is already exceeding what we do for eBay. I'm going to share a little bit about how PayPal wins. We have, as we've talked about, some significant structural advantages with our two-sided platform. We're able to connect the buyer and seller in new contexts. There's an explosion of new contexts out there. When we started building for mobile, the thing that we believed was that mobile was just the first of many new contexts where buyers and sellers would meet one another.
We believe there was a common thread across those, which is that across those many new places, whether it was on a mobile device or in a VR or AR session or the dashboard of a car, the common thread, the user doesn't have a great input device. Voice activation, these are all places the user doesn't have a physical keyboard anymore. They don't have a great input device. Having the context to go light up the experience for the user and connect the user to those great experiences wherever they encounter them is critical, and that's what the two-sided platform allows us to do.
As you have a continued explosion of those new places, we clearly become the partner of choice across all those, and that's why you've seen us become a major partner to the tech platforms that are creating those because we're able to do that. We think there's a lot more to come from that. It creates real advantage for us. One other thing to understand, though, and we've talked about this some in the past, is that our two-sided platform and our ability to control the end-to-end experience creates a real distribution advantage for us. You first saw us do this with One Touch, where we've gotten to over nine million merchants, but those merchants didn't have to do work to go get a great new experience. Those merchants just woke up one morning, and they had a great new buying experience.
They just had a better conversion rate, they didn't have to go do a new integration. They didn't have to do work to get it. We talked about it then that this was a really special thing we had created, the ability to go deploy new experiences without merchants doing work. You saw us do it again with Google Pay, that we could take Google Pay to millions of merchants without those merchants doing work. You're seeing us do it again with Pay with Venmo. The 2 million-plus merchants got access to Venmo users, they did no work to get it. As we're working with issuers on rewards points, paying with your rewards points, there were a couple big merchants you could do that, you couldn't do that everywhere.
As we roll that out, that'll be available across millions of merchants on our platform, they won't have to do work to get it. What that does for us is that if you think about the next decade, there's an explosion of new context, an explosion of new experiences, we have the ability to go deliver things far faster than anybody else could do them because others that don't control that end-to-end experience, they have to go knock on a merchant's door every time there's something new.
Please, Mr. or Ms. Merchant, won't you go do a new integration for this?" And then, "Oh, well, how many consumers do you have?" "Oh, I don't have a lot of consumers yet." "Well, why should I bother doing this new integration?" We just show up and deliver value, the merchants don't have to do work to get it's a material advantage for us. It also means that as we're testing these things, we have the ability to go test many, many more experiences. In the world of baseball, if you bat 300, you're in the Hall of Fame. In the world of product development, probably 100 would get you in the Hall of Fame. In a world where the batting averages are low, the number of at-bats matters tremendously.
Because we can control the end-to-end experience, we're testing variations on these experiences across millions of users, not just millions of consumers, millions of merchants every single day. We get orders of magnitude more at-bats to go figure these things out than others do in the ecosystem. That's a very significant advantage. When you compound that advantage over years, that's why you've seen us outpacing other entrants into the market, why we think we can continue to outpace other entrants into the market. I'm going to close with how we continue to propel that. You've seen us fundamentally change the way that we're able to build. As Dan mentioned, we've rebuilt nearly every major product experience in PayPal over the last three years. You see that reflected in our results. We've also changed the way that we build.
John Kunze is going to talk to you about how we do that for consumers. Amit Jhawar is going to talk about how we do that for merchants. Leah Sweet and Sri Shivananda are going to talk to you about how we do that in terms of how we build, how we deliver great technology platforms. Jim Magats is going to come up and talk to you about how we partner, how we become a great partner to the ecosystem.
We think that as we have these natural advantages and these distinct capabilities that we can offer, a great ability to go build them ourselves, a great ability to partner with the ecosystem, and an ability to go buy when we need to because we have a strong balance sheet, and we've built tech platforms and distribution capabilities such that when we do buy something, we have great distribution capabilities. We think the composite of those gives us great ability to continue doing something quite distinctive well into the future. As I opened with, to be a truly iconic company that's enduring, you need to do something distinctive, and you need to do it at a moment in time that that distinctive thing is in great demand. We truly believe that's the opportunity we have here at PayPal.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Amit Jhawar to come up and tell you about how we're doing that for merchants. Thank you all.
Hello, and thank you for coming today. I know many of you are interested in learning more about the merchant side of our platform, and I'm excited to have some time to explain that to you. As COO of Braintree, I spend hundreds of hours every single year talking to existing and prospective merchants, and one thing is becoming increasingly clear, they all need help. They need a partner who's going to help them maximize their business. They need great technology and tools and support to continue to grow around the edges. They need a way to go compete with Amazon. They're looking for partners who can bring them new customers and new experiences so they can focus on their core business while we can help them on the edges.
We believe PayPal's focus on innovation makes us distinctive in the way we can serve small merchants and big merchants all around the world. To understand our advantages, we talk about four main topics. One will be where PayPal focuses in the transaction life cycle. The second will be understanding the evolution of PayPal's product as it's happened on the merchant side. The third will be looking at the PayPal and the Braintree flywheels and how they feed one another. Finally, why we're so excited about the future and some of the innovation that's coming up. With that, I'd like to start with why we think PayPal's focus on the transaction is differentiated from other players. We'll start with a very simple transaction flow here. It's a cardholder entering their card information into a merchant's website. The merchant then sends it on to the processor.
The processor sends it on to the acquiring bank, to the card brands, to the issuing bank. Most of you guys know exactly how that works. If we start at the end of this process, at the back end, processing a transaction and settling funds has been around for decades. It really hasn't changed. It's the same thing that we've been doing over and over again, and basically a core function of banks. As you see more and more players enter this space and less and less differentiation, this has become more like dial tone. They're not competing on anything but price. Price is what's used to drive new business, to try to win new customers, and try to compete. Ultimately, the lack of innovation and differentiation here makes this more like a commodity.
Some of the players in this space have tried to add new geographies and add new alternative payment methods as a source of differentiation. Unfortunately, when looking at geographies and alternative payment methods, this work is very much laid out in detailed integration guides. There's often a certification process to go live. These are not enduring advantages. Anyone can do them. Any development team can get these done. You just need a little bit of time. What is also really true about these alternative payment methods and geographies is there's a very rapid diminishing return on incremental payment methods and geographies. The first couple add to the offering, but after that, there's a rapid falloff. On the other hand, PayPal focuses on the front end of the transaction. This is where the consumer and the merchant meet.
The consumer wants to buy something, and the merchant wants to sell. We want to help merchants maximize their business and remove as much friction from that transaction as possible. Today, consumers are readily adding items to their carts and abandoning those transactions without clicking buy. They've invested the time to pick out exactly what they want, put it in a cart, but not complete the transaction. We think PayPal's innovation, and particularly the way we focus on removing friction from the front end of the transaction by bringing consumers and merchants together, really makes us distinctive in the space. A great example of this would be Braintree when we first decided that we were going to invest in mobile.
We realized back in 2011, when the iPhone 4S was the device that everyone was using, in the small form factor of mobile, there was going to be new challenges that merchants weren't prepared for. People were purchasing on the go. They were purchasing in between text messages, emails, and phone calls. They were looking for ways to conduct commerce, but they didn't have a way to balance a credit card, type in all the information, and make the transactions happen. Braintree released its first mobile SDKs back then in early 2012 and started learning and developing relationships with the best tech companies in mobile. That continued to evolve and ultimately became Venmo Touch, which was the first evolution of PayPal's One Touch product, which has been the most rapidly adopted product in all of PayPal history.
This is just one example of where we focused on a specific customer need, a specific customer problem, put our innovation to work, and really drove differential value in the marketplace better than anyone else. PayPal's focus on innovation has made us a partner for these merchants. As we look at PayPal's product evolution on the merchant side, it's really been a massive transformation over the last several years. PayPal is no longer satisfied just being a button checkout. We are a platform. You integrate to PayPal, you get access to all our assets. You can get PayPal Credit, you can get working capital, you can do the branded button, you can do unbranded. All these are available through a single integration today. We're used to all these separate integrations, different groups driving them. It was hard to upsell and cross-sell. Like Bill said, everything was a separate integration.
We need a lot of work done by merchants. We've taken that away now. The platform has also deepened our relationships with these customers. Now we're the one-stop shop for our customers, we have more interaction with them. We're connecting our tech team directly with their tech team. We're understanding their problems, and we're solving those problems and understanding what new innovation we can bring out to solve issues that are coming up and that are on the cutting edge. We want to help them maximize their business and drive their conversion, and talking to our customers with that relationship is the best way to get it done. PayPal is also mobile. You heard from Bill and everyone about One Touch. One Touch was a massive product for us. It showed that we were leaders in the mobile space. We're a leader in payments.
We were thinking about what was coming up. Not only that's the first order piece of it. The second order piece is we have some of the best mobile companies in the planet on our platform using the Braintree SDK. The deep relationships we have with those customers allow us to spend time understanding what they need next. For example, reducing the number of calls between a mobile device, a merchant, and ourselves, right? Internet connections are spotty. We need speed in transaction. Latency matters a lot. We've continued to push our innovation directly at the places where merchants are telling us they need help to improve their conversion rates, to get merchants to be as big as they can, and to have consumers convert as high as possible. There also is the Braintree SDK.
The Braintree SDK is a big innovation on the PayPal side. It's one technical integration, one software development kit that gives you access to the entire PayPal platform. It also gives you the best experiences immediately as you integrate. One Touch is implemented there. Some of the testing capabilities Bill mentioned come directly as part of the mobile SDK and the SDK package you can get with Braintree. Braintree is also the only way that you can get PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, local payment methods in one integration. No one else in the planet can do that. If you want those payment methods, you would have to have multiple integrations, you'd have to have multiple tech stacks, you'd have to have multiple reconciliations, multiple disputes processes. Tech companies are looking to simplify their lives, not complicate them.
We can offer all those advantages in one integration. We also continue to extend our advantage with a product called Braintree Extend. What Braintree Extend is really allowing mobile commerce to happen in ways where consumers are present. As you think about contextual commerce, Bill gave a great example of Facebook. You can be on Facebook, you can be chatting with your friends, you discover a new event you want to go to, and you can purchase tickets directly from Ticketmaster or Eventbrite without leaving the Facebook property. In context, relevant experiences, maximizing the sales for merchants, connecting consumers with merchants, it's only the way we can do it. Another great example of the Braintree Extend product would be card-linked offers.
Today, if you do a card-linked offer with an issuing bank, typically, you don't know until you get your statement if you've actually qualified for the card-linked offer or not. With Braintree's Extend product, we're able to do this real-time. Merchants didn't want to hold the credit card information, check with the issuing bank to see if they qualify, and then show a different price to the consumer real-time because no one wants credit card information in their environment. With Braintree, we're able to connect directly to the issuer and send that information on behalf of the merchant. The merchant can dynamically display the price with the discount already in it after verifying with the issuer that that discount is indeed warranted for that consumer on that transaction. The consumer sees the price they want.
The merchant is getting a lower overall value proposition, a lower price for the consumer, but a higher value proposition overall. We're connecting consumers and merchants in ways they didn't get connected before. The results speak for themselves. As you look at these brands here, every single one of these companies up here has decided to integrate with the Braintree SDK to solve their payments needs. Some of the most discerning tech companies on the planet are on this list. Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Uber, Airbnb, Wish. These are a fraction of the merchants, but some of the most compelling, fastest-growing businesses are using us as their technical integration, not just a route to get last-mile merchant accounts. We have a technical integration between our tech company and their tech company. There's feedback going back and forth. This is differentiated.
We really are using this relationship to extend our advantage. We're understanding what they need. We understand the problems that they're facing. We understand what to go build next. We're taking this advantage and continuing to make it available to the masses, such that whether you're a small customer and a startup or one of the largest customers on the planet, you use the same SDK to integrate with us. The depth of the integration can be different, but all those capabilities are available to you, just as they're available to New Year's Eve on New Year's Eve for Uber or for a new T-Swift concert that Live Nation is selling. As we think about the PayPal business and the Braintree business, they really propel one another. The PayPal brought the consumer side of the business that Braintree didn't have, and Braintree brought the merchant side.
As you've seen, every single quarter, we're increasing the number of consumers on the platform and consumer engagement. Those consumers are using PayPal more on Braintree merchants. That creates more Braintree merchants wanting PayPal. We have merchants using the Braintree SDK, adding PayPal. It doesn't take any more code. It's that same integration. You don't have a big change. You can test it very quickly. As we add more PayPal buttons all across the Braintree merchant base, more consumers are using PayPal. We're adding new consumers to the PayPal ecosystem. These both are propelling each other faster and faster than we'd grow independently. One of the things of this is that this is actually a multiplicative effect. That if you just looked at PayPal or you just looked at Braintree, you wouldn't get nearly the same size growth.
Together, we're getting much faster growth because we've combined them together. We're doing it with the best capabilities we have on the planet. The Braintree SDK is always being updated, always being tested, always innovating there to try to see what's working and to deliver new solutions and technology to our merchants. If we think about what we've done on the Braintree side of this portfolio now, more than a third of Braintree's merchants, top merchants, have either improved their PayPal integration or taken PayPal for the first time because of this flywheel effect. That's phenomenal. When you think about the names, this is like wish.com and Airbnb, have changed their integration or taken PayPal for the first time because they were Braintree customers and they wanted to test the product out.
On the flip side, there were merchants that were PayPal merchants that weren't Braintree merchants that have now taken the Braintree SDK and integrated their whole platform that way. We've expanded our relationship to them. These are merchants like StubHub, Vivid Seats, and Grubhub. There are net new merchants that neither of us had. These are new accounts that make our sales team so excited because we've gone after white space. Neither of us had it. We weren't being successful on our own, but together we've won. These are merchants like Live Nation, Crate & Barrel, and Williams-Sonoma. The platform that we offer with all the different solutions are making new ways for consumers to connect with merchants. We're driving higher conversion rates. We're driving better results. We're allowing businesses to reach their potential. PayPal's innovation is making us a core partner for merchants.
If you think about why we're so excited about the future, there's a lot of innovation that's happening over the next several quarters that we're ready to release. Bill mentioned Smart Payment Buttons. Smart Payment Buttons are becoming more and more relevant for our merchants every single day. It's almost every week now you hear a new type of pay being announced. A merchant can't have 20 different payment buttons on a mobile checkout, so they need help. They're asking us, "How do I simplify checkout? How do I maximize conversion rate? Which ones do I show?" Smart Payment Buttons are exactly that. We heard the customer need. We went and we built a solution for it. We can tell the merchant which are the most likely payment methods to show to allow them to get the highest approval rates on each consumer.
They'll be dynamic by consumer and by their trends. We're also democratizing access to many of the capabilities that PayPal has. PayPal has some fraud capabilities that are largely unmatched in the world. We guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in payments through our protections. Right now, we traditionally leave that mostly for our branded side of the business. Well, we can expand that capability. We can let others use our risk engine to modify it for their specific risk profile and risk tolerance. Risk as a service is something that we are actively working on and testing with merchants so they can cater and use the rules that we have as PayPal to build their business and expand it into regions and countries and transaction types that they wouldn't have done before. There's also the processing optimization of PayPal.
PayPal has a massive, sophisticated box that's built on getting the highest approval rates, lowest latency, and lowest cost. Right now, we've reserved that really for the PayPal branded portion of the business. We can expand that and allow merchants to access that same capability on credit card transaction and all other types of processing that they do through us. This is something we will bring to bear in the next several quarters and allow merchants to benefit from the higher approval rates, connecting consumers to merchants using innovation to differentiate us from the competition. As we come to the end of this part of the conversation, there are a few points I want to leave you with. The first is PayPal focuses on the innovative part of the transaction life cycle.
We focus on the front end, where the consumer and the merchant intersect, and we work extraordinarily hard to drive out any friction that exists there. We're not a button anymore. We're a platform. We're a set of solutions. We're a set of assets. One integration can get you access to all of it. We've taken our advantage in mobile, and we're extending it. We're using the relationships we have, the deeper technical connections, and figuring out what we need to build next. The Braintree SDK is the best way to accept PayPal, and it's also the only way when you have PayPal to accept Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, local payment methods in a single integration. Any other solution will complicate your technical stack, require a lot more work, both in your back office, front office, and your tech team. Braintree and PayPal's businesses have propelled one another.
PayPal's brought the consumer side, Braintree's bringing the merchant side. We're seeing them speed up because of one another. The innovation right around the corner is truly remarkable. We have the Smart Buttons coming out that are going to help the problem of which payment methods to show at which times to which consumers. We're unleashing the capabilities that we have in our fraud platform and our payment optimization for all merchants to consume and to benefit from. We're focused on making merchants as successful as possible so they can maximize their business across the globe. As you guys, as analysts today, I hope this was helpful in explaining a little bit of the PayPal merchant strategy for you. We're really excited for the future because we think innovation wins this race more than anything else. Thank you.
I'd like to turn over to John Kunze, who runs Global Consumer strategy and Product for PayPal.
I just love hearing Amit talk because every time I hear him talk, I'm so excited about what's happening on the merchant side because that drives so much value into the consumer side of the business. You can't overestimate the power of this two-sided network. Amit just did a great job talking about what they're doing for that two-sided network. Now I'm going to talk about what's happening on the consumer side related to this two-sided network. We will continue to build the basic value proposition for consumers, which I'll talk about in a moment. We will also continue to build consumer segment by consumer segment on a global scale. In combination with that two-sided network, the power of that two-sided network, and this amazing onset of partnerships from issuing banks and ecosystem partners, we aspire in the long run to reach 1 billion consumers.
A little bit later on in the program, you're going to hear from Leah about how we build software now, how we put the customer first, how we do discovery, how we work on end-to-end solutions. We have this literally maniacal, tenacious, relentless attitude to build the best possible solutions we can. Not the minimally viable, the best solutions we can for these segments of consumers. That, we think, makes this objective, this aspirational long-term objective of 1 billion consumers realistic. Let me tell you a bit about why I think that. You heard Amit, Bill, and Dan talk about PayPal being more than just a button. Amit did a great job talking about it from the merchant perspective. Well, I'm going to talk about it from the consumer's perspective because we are way more than a button.
We offer three things in the basic value proposition for all PayPal consumers. The first thing we do is we make consumers more confident to shop online. We have the world's best risk management, anti-fraud technology, compliance technology. That presides over all transactions to protect consumers. If there was by some chance, let's say you buy something from a merchant overseas that you've never bought from before, and the goods don't come, or the goods don't come as expected, or you just change your mind. Guess what? PayPal protects you. You can return those goods with our free return shipping on eligible purchases. Who does that? Who in payment processing lets customers just unilaterally return goods and let them do it easily and for free? PayPal does. With the onset of mobile, and you guys can all appreciate this, people expect more convenience.
When's the last time you whipped out your mobile phone and you used an app and it was kind of wonky, and you said, "That's a stupid company." That's because you're expecting more as a consumer. We know this. We know that customers expect with that little device to be able to do things more easily, which is why One Touch was so important. It made commerce on mobile, which is where everyone is buying stuff now, much easier. Because of this amazing technology we have, we can have high confidence that you are you. With the click of a button, you don't have to give a username or a password or your shipping address or your billing address or your financial instrument.
You can walk down the sidewalk while on a conference call, looking at your phone and buy something from nordstrom.com that you promised that you would buy without really thinking about it. Thirdly, we offer our customers the greatest flexibility and choice. You've been hearing about choice for 18 months or so now from us. It's become a central part of our value thesis. Simple. Let customers do what they want to do, and they'll be more loyal. Let customers buy from any device, from any operating system, from any place. Let customers fund the way they want to fund things. The discussion on rewards points you heard earlier is going to be a tremendous part of providing more flexibility.
Now when you receive money on PayPal, you can more and more instantly access that money to either buy things, send things in P2P, or withdraw that money right into your bank account or onto your debit card instantly. Flexibility and choice and speed are all becoming part of this basic value proposition. You think about when you hear someone say, "Yeah, we compete with PayPal on payment processing." Again, earlier, you heard Amit talk about the back office versus the front office. We always ask ourselves, well, do they really? Do they have Buyer Protection? Do they have free return shipping? Do they have the most convenient, most secure way to buy on mobile? Do they have flexibility and choice for their consumers? Do they let people in Germany Pay After Delivery? That's what we call Pay After Delivery. No, probably not.
It's really important as you think about the ecosystem, that you also think about the consumer value proposition as I've just outlined. Obviously, if this was all I just had to say about consumer value prop, I think that would be fantastic, it's not the only thing I'm going to say today. While we're extending the value prop that I described, we're also segment by segment delivering value for our consumers that goes well beyond the basic value proposition. I mean, two examples. One is well-known and proven at PayPal. It's our P2P business. You heard Bill touch on it a little bit. I'm going to touch more on it. The second is something we've been talking about in our vision that we're just now beginning to execute on with a product portfolio for the unbanked. Let's start with P2P.
The power of three wallets. I like to say it's sort of different horses for different courses. Even in one use case called P2P, we have decomposed this use case into three consumer segments, we have targeted three brands for those segments, and those brands each have focused all of their efforts on building the single best solution for that customer. We have Xoom serving first-generation immigrants here in the U.S. on a very emotional use case of sending money back home from here to loved ones back home. Their loved ones back home often don't have a digital experience, so that money has to go directly into a bank account or has to be paid out in cash. That's all that Xoom does is focus on that first-generation immigrant use case, and they do it really, really well.
We have Venmo, which of course everyone in the room knows about, specializing in a millennial demographic who's grown up in digital social circles and expects the movement and management of money to be social. We have an entire business unit focused just on that use case. There's PayPal. Very biased towards global money transfer and global commerce. You can buy something anywhere in the world with PayPal's P2P rails. The numbers are astounding. $103 billion of processed volume in the last 12 months. Year-over-year growth rate over the last three years, always better than 40%. It's important to note that this is all or mostly all consumer-to-consumer volume. Oftentimes, when you hear about volume metrics in the P2P world, you will hear about volumes that's business-to-business as well. Ours is all consumer-to-consumer when we talk about these numbers.
According to Business Insider, by 2021, this business on mobile will be about $336 billion. It's nice to know that our numbers are as big as they are already. Trust me, we're not stopping here. It's only going to get better. We never stop at PayPal. We're always moving. We're always pressing forward on these customers' needs. On the Xoom side, which today is focused on U.S. remittances, that team is now focused on global origination and globalizing the solution. On the Venmo team, which was just focused on social P2P payments, are now focused on drawing that into commerce use cases, as you heard Bill talk about. On the PayPal side, this gigantic business in P2P for purchasing goods and services worldwide, we're going to make that use case easier to use, more prominent in the wallet, and even more fun and social.
These brands are moving forward according to where their customers are taking them. As you saw on Bill's slide, I will just mention one important thing here, that it is a quarter of our new customer acquisitions, but it is also our fastest growing channel of acquisitions. When you think about a P2P customer checking out twice as often as a non-P2P user, where does that point out? It points out that even within the consumer value proposition, we have our own flywheel, because as we are moving people from one feature to another, they get more engaged in the entire platform. That is why we want to bring P2P into new contexts. We want to give more and more of our consumers reasons to use this use case. To give you a great example of that is a new feature we just launched recently called Money Pools.
This is taking the concept of person-to-person payments and moving it to group payments. Now if you are with five of your friends, going to go to a wedding in a few months, you can all pitch in and buy the bride and groom one big wedding gift. You can set aside money as a group to go on a group vacation. I do not know how many of you have experience managing a classroom as a volunteer room parent, or if you are a coach of a sports team for your kids. Trying to raise money in that context, super hard. Very awkward, actually, to ask people, "Oh, can we have $15 to give the teachers so they can buy school supplies?" Now we can just launch a Money Pool and ask people to donate that way. There have been 250,000 such pools launched since we launched this feature.
This is really cool. One out of seven contributors to a Money Pool are new to PayPal, and one in four contributors to a Money Pool are new to P2P. That means they were just using us for commerce. They see this new context, this new experience, and now they start using P2P. On average, if history holds true, that customer will now start checking out twice as often. That is what I mean by that consumer flywheel. Even inside the consumer business, we have a flywheel. We just keep adding value. We always want to be where our customers are going.
With that platform that you have heard us talk about, and you will hear more about it later from Sri and Leah, where we have this ability to efficiently integrate into new experiences like Facebook or Google or Alexa or Skype, where you can send money and interact with people using PayPal in these new experiences. In context payments, we built this PayPal.Me link so that you can sell goods and services and charge through a link that you can put in instant messenger, on Facebook, and Pinterest. Already, we have 17.5 million links have been established. We are always trying to think through the new context and how we can be there before the customers get there, so that when they come, we are there with a complete solution.
P2P is an example of tried and proven segmented use case, even in P2P, we had three segments, right? Here's another whole new segment. You've heard us talk about democratizing financial services, helping people move and manage money, making access to money easier, simpler, more secure, more affordable, bringing more people into the world of digital payments. That's where our unbanked portfolio comes into play. Boy, if you can't get up out of bed in the morning and race to work to serve this use case, I don't know what could possibly get you out of bed. 2 billion people around the world don't have access to bank accounts. They live outside the circles of our traditional financial services. 30 million Americans spend 9.6% of their income with alternative financial services providers, which just so happens to be the same percent of income the average U.S.
family spends on food. This is why we like to say it's expensive to be poor. We can do a lot better than this, can't we? We know that half of Americans, if you were to walk down Main Street, USA, every other person you see wouldn't have $400 in savings to pay for an emergency, wouldn't be able to fix the car, wouldn't be able to take their child to the emergency room without being in abject fear of how they were going to pay for it.
We know that 85% of today's transactions are still in cash and in checks, if we brought that business into the digital world with all the convenience associated with it, while lowering all those costs for doing business outside of our financial systems, we would see $3.7 trillion of GDP added to the markets of emerging markets while doing good for so many consumers. This is what PayPal is doing about this, we've just started. We launched the portfolio of features recently. Starting on the right side of the screen, you'll see the PayPal Cash Mastercard, which allows the unbanked to join the world of digital commerce. They can now pay for goods and services online. By the way, lots of online goods and services are cheaper than you can get them offline.
Of course, because it's a Mastercard, you can also use this card to shop offline. Now we have a card that enables digital commerce and offline commerce simultaneously. Ubiquitous payments, in other words. How do you get money onto the card? If you're an unbanked customer and you are getting paid by payroll, just put it onto the card via direct deposit. If you're one of the many unbanked customers who are paid by check, you walk down the mission after the program's over and find your first alternative financial services provider, I can promise you, many of the people online there are going to be handing checks over the counter to get cash at a huge cost. Now you can just scan those checks and bring them into PayPal instantly at a small cost or over time for free.
For those living in the cash world, gee, we have 30,000 retail locations. CVS, Dollar General, 7-Eleven are just examples of retailers where you can now walk in, put $100 on the counter, and see it show up in your PayPal Balance seconds later for a very, very small fee. Once that money is in PayPal, of course, you can spend it the way I just described, but you can also manage it. We talk about the movement and management of money. When we go out and talk to the unbanked customer, one of the things that we see rings true is that they store cash in secret places because they want to immunize themselves from unwisely spending that cash. The money in the shoebox is for rent. The money under the mattress is for the car payment. The money in the cookie jar is for food.
Boy, that little piggy bank over there I put my coins into, that's for date night once or twice a month to go see the movies maybe. Well, we have this thing called Goals. These are digital places to put money to help people from unwisely spending their funds. It turns out if you just remind someone to save a dollar or two, they will. If you don't remind them, they probably won't. You're going to see a growing portfolio functionality in this category of management to help these customers live financially healthier lives. Exciting. Let's cut to a video now to show you a customer who's used this.
Being a freelance worker, I don't have a steady income. One month, I get one check, the next month, I get four checks, and I have to find a way to use that money. My name is Amy, and I've been using PayPal for about four years. I use my PayPal Cashback Mastercard to pay for everything I need.
Groceries, pet supplies. I love having it because it is free to sign up, the fees are lower than the other prepaid cards, and there's no minimum balance. What I used to do is when I got my check, I'd go to one store, cash it. Have to get a prepaid card, pay the fee, whatever it was, load it, and then I'd use it, and at the end of the day, I would end up losing a portion of my paycheck just to fees. It was very time-consuming, it was very costly, and it was a real pain in the butt. I learned a secondary option for me would be to use PayPal. I get my checks mailed to my home. I open up Mobile Check Capture, take a picture of my check, and I have my money in my PayPal account.
It is way better than the old inconvenient way. I feel like the world is not set up for people who don't have bank accounts, and PayPal makes my world easier. I have a life, and I have much better things to do than go from store to store in order to get my money that I earned.
Love that video. We love these customers, and we love solving their problems. It's working. The money that goes on this PayPal Cash Card, a third of that money is re-spent on the PayPal platform, either in checkout or P2P. If it's not spent on the PayPal platform as we know it today, it's spent on that card, expanding our merchant base to places like McDonald's and Amazon and Walmart because they're using the card at those merchants offline. The interesting thing is that the card customers using this portfolio of features are using PayPal five times a week, which is, of course, a lot more than two to three times a month on our averages. This just proves that if you focus on a customer segment, deliver the single best solution for them, that they will engage at higher and higher rates.
I think that is a great illustration of things to come. We have an architecture that allows us to globally deploy, but configures itself for local relevance by customer segment or by geography. Let's just say we went to Mexico and said, "What does the general market Mexican need?" We know they want digital commerce. They want P2P. They want the ability to bring cash into the system. They want the ability to pay their bills. Otherwise, they have to stand in line to pay their bills. They want the ability to pay for local transportation, to pay a prepaid mobile phone. We can add these use cases into a focused, segmented solution for a market like that and bring it to market now because of the way our technology's organized and because of the way we build software now.
If we were to build this for people who live and work in Manhattan, like probably many of you do, you could tell me during the break what use cases we would want in that solution, and we'd have the ability to deliver that. That's just part of the overall story here. We have a generic consumer value proposition that applies to all PayPal consumers. Increasingly, you're going to see us delivering customer segment by customer segment value proposition to drive an internal consumer flywheel that drives a two-sided network because of our global products and because you're going to begin to see a multi-use wallet experience that goes beyond just commerce and P2P, and drives engagement that is much higher than our averages today on top of the ability for us to reach a billion consumers.
That is the story from the consumer side of the house. Great value prop, focus segmented value propositions, multi-use wallet, 1 billion consumers. Thank you very much. I'd like to bring up Gabrielle now. Melissa Bergen.
Thanks, John. That was incredible. We're ready for our break. We're right on time. Let's plan to restart at 10:50, in approximately 20 minutes. As a reminder, again, please fill out any questions on the cards on your tables so we can collect them and answer them during the Q&A session. Thank you.
My name is Rose Morris. My company is Abram's Nation, and we are in Gibsonia, PA. The company started because of my son, Abram. Come sit right up here. He has autism, and when he was two, we were having a really difficult time keeping him in bed. He was crawling out. I thought it was a danger. We needed a way to contain him and keep him safe so that we could also sleep and not be worried that he would be doing all sorts of things in the middle of the night that a two-year-old shouldn't be doing. We created The Safety Sleeper for him, and it was an amazing gift. Bedtime now is a cinch. Get in The Safety Sleeper, good night, kisses, and you leave. They go to sleep.
As soon as I had The Safety Sleeper and I knew how great it was for us, I figured there had to be other people.
Please welcome back Gabrielle Rabinovitch.
Okay, we're back. Home stretch. Everyone, if you could sit down, that'd be great. We're going to start with a video, then Jim Magats is going to come on stage and talk about choice and partnerships.
As we were coming out of the eBay split, we were thinking about who we wanted to be, we made the real important decision for us to be an open platform. In being an open platform, what we wanted to say is, "Let's get as many customers onto our platform as possible." That really drove us to the decision to say, we have to give our customers choice and the flexibility to pay however they want. We're really excited with the progress that we've made.
To have PayPal and Visa come together is something that just made a lot of sense for both of us. The agreement that Visa and PayPal struck first in the U.S. in 2016 had several beneficial elements for consumers and our joint clients. The first is consumer choice, simply allowing a consumer to decide how they want to make a purchase. The second would be simple money movement, this is making it easy to move money into and out of the PayPal and Venmo environments. Data integrity, making sure there's good, clean, understandable data for PayPal transactions. Finally, security and safety, and the provision of tokens to PayPal so that PayPal can proceed to attack new verticals and new use cases for their consumers.
One of the things I think that's most exciting about the partnership with PayPal and Citi is what we're bringing to our mutual customers. The trust people have in PayPal, and the trust they have in big banks around keeping their information safe and secure, the power of bringing all that together makes for a really great partnership.
The partnership between Banorte and PayPal means Banorte is going to be able to continue evolving in the digital spectrum, but now doing it hand-in-hand with a leader in payment processing. The initiative that we're working on is going to be the first of its kind in Mexico and Latin America.
Since we actually made the global deal with PayPal, we've aligned around the choice strategy, we've been able to really accelerate the partnership and find a tremendous amount of common ground.
The payment space is evolving and changing constantly, now is a great time for us to leverage our longstanding relationship and lead together in the next generation of what payments will become.
Our aspiration is to be the platform of choice for all of these partners as we go forward. Thanks for coming back. This morning, I had a bit of a divine providence moment. I decided to take a run, and I came out of the hotel. I made a left, then a right on Market Street. Went one block, I saw a Citibank branch on my left. Went another two blocks, I saw a Bank of America branch. Another two blocks, Wells Fargo, then Chase. Then I saw another Citibank branch, and finally, I ended up by the Ferry Building, and I looked across the street, and I saw the Visa building. 0.6 miles, but a long journey that we've come over the course of the last two years.
Who would have imagined two years ago, if you were at our last Investors' Day, that we would be sitting here today, words coming out of the mouths of Visa, Mastercard, Citi, and others, trust, partnership, collaboration, digital leadership. Two strategies came to fruition for us to make that 0.6 mile march absolutely come to fruition for us. Number one, our decision to move to Customer Choice. Customer Choice is enabling our customers to pay however they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. In moving to Customer Choice, we not only removed a friction for our customers, we removed a friction for us to partner with members of the ecosystem. Concurrently, we made the decision to be an open platform, not a walled garden, not a place where we did it our way. We embraced network standards.
We embraced partnership as a way forward because we knew only together that we can collectively accelerate digital payments. Don't see these as two individual strategies. See these as two complementary strategies. Choice begets partnerships, and partnerships gives better choices to our customers. Collectively, this viral impact drives engagement for us and our partners in better, frictionless, and more flexible payment experience for our customers. Now, I've had the privilege of having a front-row seat for our movement to Choice and the creation of many of the partnerships that we've had, especially with the ecosystems and networks as well as the issuers. What I want to do today is answer a few questions that I've gotten for the last several months. Number one, how is Choice performing? Number two, why would anyone want to partner with PayPal, especially a bank?
Number three, what are the encouraging and early signs that we see in partnering with banks and networks, and why ultimately, we think we can be the payment partner of Choice for all ecosystems. Let's begin with Choice. Now, as Dan alluded to, I've been with PayPal for a long time, and I've had the privilege or pleasure of sitting in many a town hall meeting. When Dan came into PayPal, at the time, there was a bit of an existential battle going on within PayPal. Are we a tech company or are we a payments company? It was like the old beer commercial, going back and forth, payments, tech, payments, tech. Then one town hall, right after Dan started, some brave soul had the audacity to ask the question, "Dan, what are we?
Are we a payments company or are we a tech company?" I remember Dan looking down, looking up, and answering, "Neither." To which I said, "Good job, Dan. You've just alienated 100% of the company as we gone through that." What Dan went on to say is that we are and will be a customer champion company. As a customer champion company, we will do things that are in the best interest of our customers, even though it may be misunderstood by the public, even though it may have short-term financial impact to us, because in the long run, being a champion of our customers will always be the way that we will maintain growth and maintain our position of digital leadership.
As we reflected on that profound proclamation of being a customer champion organization, we basically looked at what are the most core experience that our customers have, and what we could do to make sure that we are always a customer champion for them. Choice is a very subtle change. Now, you could look at these two different experiences and go, "What's really different?" To the naked eye, it doesn't appear that there's very much, but from a customer point of view, it's a very profound change. Number one, what we have done is we've made it possible for a customer to set any one of their funding instruments as a preferred method of payment. Number two, we've basically made it so you can see all your funding instruments as you check out.
As Bill referenced and John referenced, we want to create the digital manifestation of your physical wallet in a digital environment for you as you go forward. Previously, when we weren't acting as a customer champion, we made it very hard for you to do what you wanted to do. Imagine you're a Bank of America customer, you want to use your Bank of America rewards card. You're on PayPal and you're about to check out, you just happen to have had balance in your PayPal account. Well, guess what? You weren't able to use it. We made it impossible if you had enough balance to use your Bank of America rewards card. If you had an ACH or bank account attached, well, you could get to your Bank of America rewards card, but it would take many steps to be able to do that.
We came out and said, "We want flexibility for our customers. We want frictionless experience." While Choice has become an experiential change for us, as John alluded to, it's a principle by which we operate. Choice and flexibility is embedded into all that we do. About a year ago, as the NBA Finals were just about to launch here in Oakland, on TV, we decided to come out and show what Choice really meant to our customers in an ad that went out right before tip-off of the NBA Finals Game one. For us, we were tipping off our entree into giving Choice for our customers. I believe this ad really demonstrates the flexibility and the convenience of using the PayPal wallet. Can you roll the video please?
PayPal lets you check out with any of your payment types because sometimes debit makes sense. Other times, credit makes sense.
Flexibility, ease of use. These are the operating principles that we operate with our customers. I can't tell you one year later who's going to be the NBA Finals, I can tell you unequivocally that our customers love Choice. We're now a year of launching Choice in the U.S. Around the world, roughly 85% of our active customers have Choice available to them today. Our intention and expectation is by the end of Q3, Choice will be fully live globally. In addition, what we've seen globally is that we have roughly 40 million adopters of Choice, meaning 40 million customers have set a preference of how they want to pay in transactions going forward. What's also interesting is what they have set as a preference.
From our calculations in the U.S., this trend is now holding true globally, 70% of what they are setting as a preference is what we would consider a lower cost funding instrument, i.e. a debit card, ACH, PayPal Credit, or PayPal Balance. What's also interesting is the flexibility that our customers are showing and really what is unique about the PayPal Wallet. Think about it. 25% of the time that someone has set a preference, they're using another funding instrument, 25% of the time. Just like your physical wallet, when sometimes you want to pay with debit and sometimes you want to pay with credit, PayPal's unique advantage is that we give customers that flexibility. In addition to that, Choice has created an environment where customers are calling less to us, they're also staying with us longer. Just look at the U.S. alone.
In the last year, we have 2 million less customer contacts from Choice. That means 5,000 customers a day are more satisfied. They're not calling into our centers. What's also important to see is the halo impact of Choice. They're using us more and spending more when they're using PayPal. We have seen an incremental lift of more than 10% for those that adopt a preference on PayPal. They're using us more than 10% more if they set a preference over all other users that we have. Taken together, Choice has made good business sense for us, more importantly, it's made great sense for our customers. What Choice has also allowed us to do is to create a network of partnerships, which Bill alluded to and Dan alluded to. Why this is important is the potential of these partnerships.
If we just look at the U.S. alone and the U.S. bank partnerships that we've created with seven out of 10 of the top credit and debit card issuers, plus we look at the partnership that we have with FIS that gives us access to thousands of small and medium-sized banks, those partnerships alone give us an opportunity to work more closely with over half of spend that is today done on credit cards and debit cards. In addition, if you think about tech platforms and social platforms, which Bill alluded to, we have the opportunity now to work more closely with tens and hundreds of millions of more consumers and merchants around the world. While it's easy to see why partnerships make sense for us, let's take a step back, and let's see why do partnerships make sense for our partners, specifically banks.
Bill alluded to this before, that digital spend has been one of the greatest source of growth for banks. Where they're seeing their increase of usage is in digital environments, P2P environments, mobile payments. PayPal creates an additional accelerant for digital spend for these banks. Bill referenced the comScore and the different surveys that we have, that in essence, when a consumer is shopping with PayPal, they're twice as likely to make a transaction. If you're a Discover card and your customer is going onto walmart.com, they're twice as likely to make a transaction if they use PayPal versus any other funding mechanism. Incremental volume for the issuer, a better experience for the consumer, more volume for PayPal. The two-sided network. Think about it. PayPal, in essence, is a huge distribution channel for banks and networks.
When Visa wants to roll out its Visa Direct product, or Mastercard wants to roll out its MoneySend product to many customers around the world, one integration to PayPal gives them the opportunity to have their customers have their debit cards be used as an exit vehicle to withdraw money instantly. One integration to PayPal gives them the distribution power of over 200 million points of presence for that experience. In addition, we are a free, open, and collaborative customizable platform. We are free. We don't charge our partners to use our platform. Number two, we are a customizable platform. If you're a Barclaycard and you're in a position that you want to offer a specific merchant offer for customers on PayPal that are shopping at House of Fraser in the U.K., PayPal can do that for you through customization.
Taken together, incremental volume, distribution, and customization is why banks and others are choosing to partner with PayPal in bringing our unique advantage to them. We are in the very early innings of this journey on choice and partnership, but we are extremely encouraged by what we're seeing. I want to go through a few examples of things that we have launched or are about to launch within the next six to nine months. This is a really good example of an initial thing that we're doing right now with Bank of America. What this is account linking. If you go onto your Bank of America app, you can, in essence, within a few simple clicks, create a new PayPal account.
If you're an existing PayPal card user, you can, with a few simple clicks, add any one of your Bank of America cards into PayPal. In addition, when you do that, those cards will always be good cards for you. They'll never expire, or they'll always be usable within PayPal as we go forward. Now, why is that important? Number 1, customers love choice. Customers like flexibility. If you give a customer the ability to have multiple funding instruments, it's highly likely that they're going to convert more, and they're going to have more spending power within PayPal and on the bank's instruments, and they're going to be more satisfied. Another issue that customers are facing more and more today is what we call stale cards. In essence, something we've all experienced.
It is estimated that each year, a third of all cards go bad, meaning that they're either lost, stolen, or need to be replaced. It's probably something we've all experienced, right? We put our cards into Netflix or Comcast or any vaulted experience. Our card goes lost or stolen. We kind of go, "Ugh, now I got to go retype that into all those different locations." This is a very acute problem for recurring billers. We see with some of our recurring billing merchants that they decline over 20% of the time their transactions because cards go stale. Through this service, your card will always be fresh. You always will have a funding instrument available to you. Now instead of thinking about having to put your card into all these different locations, just put your card into PayPal. It'll always be fresh, and you always will have flexibility.
While it's very early with Bank of America, we're seeing thousands of Bank of America customers per day go through this experience, many of them new to PayPal. In addition, what we're seeing is a pretty powerful pre-post engagement lift. For those that have gone through this experience, we're seeing as much as a 30% increase of spend on our platform from this experience alone. Giving people fresh instruments and flexibility is a powerful way to drive engagement. Good for Bank of America, good for PayPal, and more importantly, good for our consumers. In addition, you'll see this experience roll out completely with Citi, Discover, Chase, Banorte, and Shinhan Card in Korea by the end of 2018. Another thing that we are doing is trying to reduce declines. Again, this is something I'm sure we've all experienced.
We're in a moment of trying to make a transaction real quick, and then the message comes up, "Please call your issuer. Your transaction has been declined." Well, what happens? Basically, because issuers are a one-sided network, they're operating with imperfect information. They only know you, and they see some pattern of behavior that you've had. PayPal is a two-sided network. Bill did a great job of demonstrating the power of that two-sided network. What is interesting is that we have close to 50 petabytes of risk data. We have seen pretty much every online transaction that has happened. We've seen good users, we've seen bad users. Now what we're doing with issuers is infusing our risk data into their scoring mechanism. Because we've seen both sides of the transaction, PayPal can give them more perfect information to decision a transaction.
We've started to pilot this with some of the leading issuers in the U.S. and around the world. We estimate that we can see order of magnitude of about a 50 basis point improvement in their overall approval rate. In this way, we can make sure that, A, the customer is happy, B, the bank, again, is driving as much volume as possible, and C, we benefit from incremental transactions. The other area of focus is how do we drive more flexibility in how people pay and be paid? Bill referenced our Instant Transfer solution that we've been rolling out over the course of the last several months. Instant Transfers is the ability to add your debit card to a PayPal account and instantly, within seconds, get that money into your bank account. It's your money. You deserve to have it as quickly as possible.
The pain point that customers have historically had is that it takes several days to get your money out. In the existing world of ACH networks and whatnot, it could take as much as three days to get your money out of a PayPal account. If you basically say, "I get paid on a Saturday," I have to wait for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to actually get my money. With Instant Transfers, instantaneously, you have access 24/7, seven days a week. This solution has been rapidly adopted. If we just see over the course of the last couple of months, we have over 8 million unique users of this solution that we're also able to monetize. In addition to just being able to create a great service, we're seeing benefit on our overall platform.
For those users that use Instant Transfer, specifically our active users, we're seeing an increase of accepted volume or increase received P2P and overall volume of over 7%. When you have liquidity, people want to use you more. Great for Visa, great for us, great for our customers. The other area that has been mentioned a few times today, which I think warrants a few minutes on, is reward points. The problem statement that we see today is that there is over $100 billion in the U.S. and Canada of unused credit card rewards that sit on the sideline. Think about it.
I'm sure all of you in this room, you probably have a portion of this $100 billion sitting in this room, that in essence, you have reward points with banks, you have reward points with groceries, you have reward points with different retailers, and $100 billion sits on the sideline, namely because you don't have a very liquid way to use those reward points. This issue is extremely acute amongst banks. Financial Times' estimate is that the top six banks in the U.S. alone generate about $30 billion of reward currency per year, of which only two-thirds get used. If you're a bank, a third of your rewards points sit as a liability every year. If you're a customer of a bank, you have very illiquid ways to utilize them.
Now what we are doing within PayPal is enabling those reward points to be real currency for you at any one of our 19 million locations. You can use all of your reward points for a transaction. You can split the transaction among reward points. In doing so, you have a liquid place to utilize all those reward points. What we anticipate is that by the end of the year, we will have this capability available for Citi, Discover, and Chase, and in 2019 with Barclays. We're very encouraged by the power of reward points for us. The other thing that we are doing is co-marketing programs, and these are mostly funded by the issuers. In these co-marketing programs, what we're trying to do is to let our customers know about the choices that they have within PayPal.
In certain cases, where they can get better value by using PayPal. Over the course of the last several months, over 20 issuers have ran promotions to have their customers utilize PayPal, and in certain cases, incenting them with money to do that. Imagine two years ago, banks like Citi, Bank of America, HSBC, paying their customers to use PayPal. Now we're there because we're their partner. You have two examples right now that are currently in play. If you're a Chase Freedom Card user, now through the end of Q2, you're going to get 5% or 5% cash back bonus by using your Freedom Card within PayPal. If you're in the U.K., if you're on Facebook, you can win free tickets, if you're a Visa card holder, to the World Cup.
These are all opportunities for us to extend the value of using PayPal in conjunction with banks. What we're also looking to do in 2019 is to create the opportunity for banks and others to message in our properties the value of their specific funding instruments. If Chase wants to indicate in that checkout flow that you saw earlier that use your Freedom Card and you're going to get 5% back, they can message that in our flow. It helps our customers make better choices. What we also see is a lot of network effects for the issuers in PayPal. On average, what we are seeing when we're running these marketing programs is a 10% lift in actual issuer spend on our platform. By just running these marketing programs, issuers are seeing more volume, PayPal is seeing more volume, and better benefits are coming to our customers.
Let's think about this from a global perspective, because what we've talked about so far has been mostly in the U.S. We are taking these experiences, and we're moving them global. If you look at the partnerships that we've announced, over half of them focus on outside the U.S. What's interesting is that we can customize our partnerships based upon the geography. For example, with Barclays, we're leveraging PSD2 and open banking to give Barclays SMB customers the ability to see all of their PayPal transaction history within the Barclays banking environment. In addition, think of the global scale that we now have the opportunity to participate in. Markets like Korea with Shinhan Card or Banorte in Mexico. These are markets that PayPal has been traditionally nascent from a consumer side.
By now partnering with these two banks alone, we have an opportunity to work more closely with over 50 million potential consumers. Power of this is unlimited for us, we're very excited to take this globally. Bill talked to you about tech platforms and the opportunities that we have there. I've talked to you about the power of payment networks and issuers and the potential that we have there. We have over 30 different partnerships. it's important not to see these partnerships as unilateral partnerships between one and two, but these are a collective effort that give mutual and reciprocal benefit to all members of the partnership ecosystem that we've created. Think about this. If you're a bank, in the partnerships that we create with banks, that benefit accrues to tech platforms.
If you're a tech platform and we create a partnership with you, that benefit accrues to our banking partners. Classic case that's been described today that I'll reiterate because I think shows the power of this. If Google on Google Play wants to enable reward points as a currency for its customers, it does not need to create one partnership with Discover, one with Chase, one with Citibank. One partnership with PayPal creates that capability. Conversely, as you saw from Bill, if Citi and others want to make sure that their customers have a very seamless experience in Facebook Messenger, or they have a seamless experience on GPay, one partnership with PayPal unlocks that. collectively, one integration gives you the power of N of our partnerships. Lastly, it's important to think of the beneficiary of this partnership strategy as not primarily banks, issuers, tech platforms, or even PayPal.
frankly, the beneficiary will be customers. Today, they're living in a very disparate world. Payment experiences are fragmented, PayPal has the unique power to be the connective tissue that brings all those experiences together. Whether you're shopping in India, Indiana, with reward points, with your debit card, in a marketplace, in store, in app, PayPal has the power to deliver that connective tissue to create that one common experience that reduces friction, creates flexibility, and always has a consistent experience wherever you're at. today, while it is very early, we are extremely encouraged that PayPal can be the partner of choice for all ecosystems and its customers. with that, I give you the great pleasure of introducing Sri Shivananda, who will talk to you about the tech platform that's powering that. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. You heard a lot of conversation about the platform this morning. Every single talk so far has mentioned the platform. I'm sure many of you are curious about what powers this platform. what I'm going to do today is take you under the hood and show you that a little bit. In my 20 years as a web scale technologist, I've never been more excited about what technology can do to create value for the business. Today, I'm going to take you behind the scenes and show you a little bit of how the platform is laid out, give you an idea of the scale at which we operate internally, show you a few of the core tenets that we apply to technology, some of the journey we've been on, and some of our focus on the future.
Let's get started. Let me take you under the hood and show you what the technology platform is all about. It's best to think of this in four layers. The first layer in the technology platform is the infrastructure and operations layer. This includes our data centers, which house all our servers and support all our applications around the world. It includes all of the hardware that we purchase and run on a continuous basis, which we design with our partners. We supply chain with them, and we cycle it through every few years. It includes the network that connects all our data centers globally and connects us to our customers and our customers back to us. The cloud environment that helps us mechanize, automate, manage, and operate all of this infrastructure.
Finally, the 24/7 operations that helps the billions of payments that happens every year on the PayPal platform. Up from here is the second layer. This first layer that I talked about, think of that as the skeletal backbone of the PayPal technology platform. The second layer from here is a technology platform. This is a system software layer which makes our developers extremely productive. They can work on ideas and make sure that those ideas hit the customer in a quick way. This helps them be productive through tools, language utilities, and this is the layer that takes care of all the common aspects like cybersecurity, key management, cryptography, and so on. This also includes the analytics platform.
We are a data-rich company. We use all of that data to process it on a continuous basis and use it in decisions on internal processes and on customer experiences. Think of this layer as the nervous system of the technology platform. Up from here is the payments operating system. This includes our identity platform, which we use to manage our customer profiles. It includes the payments platform, which we use to move and manage money. It includes the risk platform, which we use to generate and ensure that all of the transactions that we have on PayPal are safe for our consumer, for our merchants, and for the platform. The compliance platform, which helps us ensure that we are compliant with all the regulations around the world. Finally, the credit platform that allows us to give lending options to our customers.
Think of this as the brain of PayPal. Finally, up from here are the experiences. The consumer experiences and the merchant experiences on web, mobile, and through APIs. The POS devices that we have out there, and also the customer service experience where we make it whole when something goes wrong for a customer. This is the heart of PayPal. These are the experiences which our consumers and merchants interact with us on a daily basis. Collectively, this makes the PayPal technology platform. Of course, our number one priority in technology is security. It's important to make sure, because we are in the business of trust, to ensure that security is something we think top to bottom through the stack and site to site as well. I'll talk about security more in a little bit. Let me give you an idea of the scale internally.
As you are very well aware, last year we did $456 billion in payments. These are payments that we did in 200 different markets and 100 different currencies. Internally, that scales to our peak day in 2017 being 29 million payments on a single day. That's about 14,450 payments per second. Every second of reliability is very important. This is powered by 2,700 microservices, which are built by about 4,500 engineers around the world who collaborate together. Dan was talking about the talent that we have. This scale that we have at PayPal allows us to attract the best talent around the world and have them work on making sure that we continue to scale further as we go forward. Last year, we did 17,000 software releases. This is big.
Like I said, in my 20 years of web-scale technology, I've not seen this kind of velocity anywhere else. This allows us to out-compete the industry on every feature that we build. Finally, the infrastructure layer, which has 200,000 virtual servers. These virtual servers consume about 27 MW of power. 92% of this power is green. We are number 80 on the EPA Top 100 list. Finally, I said we are a data-rich company. We have 238 petabytes of data. Transactional data, operational data, risk data. Jim mentioned how we have 50 petabytes of risk data itself. To put this in perspective, if I were to put all of this data on DVDs and were to stack them up, it would be seven times taller than Mount Everest itself. That's how much data we have.
This data continues to grow at a great pace every single year. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of the scale of PayPal. This is massive from a technology perspective. The fact that we can support this, and the fact that we can continue to scale in spite of our growth every single year is evidence of the technology platform that we built, and we continue to evolve. Next, let me give you an idea of the core tenets of the platform. I mentioned to you how security is the number 1 priority at PayPal. We've always believed in a principle called paranoid computing. Many of you who use the web are very familiar with HTTPS. When you type in a URL in the browser and you see HTTPS, you feel safe that the communication between you and the server is secure.
We've always followed a methodology where we do that even within our data centers. When two machines in our data centers talk to each other, they're secure. We design security in every aspect of the life cycle, across all things related to data, both at rest and in motion, our applications, and we are beginning to apply AI and ML mechanisms to understand what's going on in the ecosystem to put even more sophisticated controls as we go forward. Second aspect is reliability. Our vision is to have 100% share of checkout for our merchants. To do this, we must ensure that we are up all the time and we are reliable. We put a significant amount of innovation focus on reliability, and in the journey, I will actually talk to you a little bit about how far we have come in reliability. Third is the risk platform.
This platform allows us to ensure that every transaction is safe. Based on years of data we have, 50 petabytes of risk data, we continuously use big data, ML, and AI mechanisms to create a feedback loop that allows us to qualify every single transaction and ensure that the transaction we are taking is safe. This is the reason we enjoy the kind of fraud rate at the 19 basis points that was mentioned before. Finally, efficiency. To run any technology platform, it's important to make sure that through modernization, standardization, optimization, and reuse, you can create a platform where every new transaction and every new payment is actually cheaper than the previous one. We have continued to do this over time, and we've seen some amazing success over the last few years.
To give you an idea of the journey we've been on and some of the progress that we've made, I want to illustrate four examples of the many that we have. Number 1 is on availability. In 2015, we started the journey. Till then, we were measuring uptime based on how our servers were up all the time, and we took an inside-in approach to measuring availability. At that time, we changed our perspective and we started to look at outside-in views. We took every single customer transaction, and we started to annotate that with a success or a failure. That changed our perspective and it changed our priorities. This has helped us move from 99% in reliability to 99.99% in reliability. This means that we are there for our customers more when they come to us. Every interaction they have with us is successful.
We continue to evolve this even going further. This has been a whole point of lift for the business, and it has also significantly reduced the number of customer calls that we get. Also, more importantly, it has reduced the unplanned work for engineers and allowed them to innovate on new things in the ecosystem and in the platform as well. Second, Dan mentioned about the monolithic code base that we had. We have tens of millions of lines of code at PayPal, and all of this was organized in one large block. This was very hard to manage. Every time we needed to make a change, we'd have to figure out what to dissect, where to make the change, test the whole system together, and that was very cumbersome to do. That is one of the reasons the velocity was much lower.
What we did was we took that and we broke it up into small building blocks. These building blocks are composable, they're configurable, they're customizable, and that gives us significant velocity, particularly in terms of parallel velocity as we go forward across all of those building block capabilities that we have done. Third is cloud computing. You've heard of this concept. Traditional methods of managing infrastructure were no longer scaling for us or for the industry for that matter. We started to apply model-driven infrastructure. We started to apply closed automation loops. Not only has that helped us manage our ecosystem better, but it has driven higher allocation and higher utilization, leading to much better efficiencies. Just a few years ago, if an engineer at PayPal had to roll out a feature or an application, it would take them weeks to do.
Now they can do it in 15 minutes. Last but not the least, the speed of innovation. All of this together has helped us move from eight releases of software in a year to 65 releases a day. That is velocity that gives us a competitive advantage in the industry. Let me shift a bit into some of the global leverage that we have created through technology. One is global reach. Customer perceived latency, based on our research, is one of the most important things in engagement and conversion. Bill talked a bit about our conversion compared to the rest of the industry and how well we do there with almost 90% in conversion. This all depends on how seamless the experience is and how fast the experience is.
About two years ago, we started a journey where at that point in time, we had three network locations around the world that connected our data centers and connected us to our customers. This meant that if a customer in Asia wanted to conduct a transaction, they would have to connect with us back in the U.S. over the internet. We now have 17 network locations around the world, and we are slowly beginning to turn that on one at a time. As we do that, we are going closer to where the customers are, and that is allowing them to connect with us faster, feel the lower latency, engage better, engage faster, and feel like they can conduct more transactions with us. This is a huge move. At dinner yesterday, I was talking to one of you, and you mentioned the spinning wheel.
This is our solution to the spinning wheel and making it much better for our customers going forward. Second is the global platform. Not only have we constructed all the capabilities that we have as a platform, building blocks that we can apply customizably to any segment, any customer population, or any part of the world. We can also do this in a way that when we build a feature, it's now available for the whole world. That doesn't mean it's the same plain vanilla feature for the whole world. We have the power of customization where we can create local experiences on top of the global platform as well. Yet another competitive asset for the company in terms of being fast to the market when we need to be. Finally, on this slide, RegTech. This is a term that has become more popular in the last two years.
We took a very different approach to compliance. As I mentioned before, we are in 200 markets and 100 different currencies. Each one of this is a jurisdiction that has laws on money, and we need to be compliant with all of those laws on money on every single transaction that is relevant in that jurisdiction. We took a platform approach to compliance, and we built it in a way that compliance was something that was constructed as building blocks by itself. These helped us create a mechanism where we couldn't just use that for PayPal, but we could use it for other parts of the portfolio as well. This allows us to be nimble in a place where the regulatory landscape is changing very, very fast. Most people don't realize, but this, again, is a competitive asset.
Normally, it's a barrier to entry into the payments landscape, and this is something that we are really, really strong at. A bit of the focus on the future. I'll cover three things here. Some of the things that we are doing in advanced elements. As I mentioned before, in technology, our number 1 priority is security. Good yesterday is not good today. So what we've done there is we've applied various new modernization methods, advanced cryptography, a very sophisticated security operation center that's 24/7, applying big data, ML, and AI to continuously look at all the things that are going on in the ecosystem and ensure that we protect against attacks at the edge. Being sophisticated in a way that we're not only securing PayPal, but through our work with the ecosystem, we've actually birthed a lot of new standards like DMARC, HSTS, and FIDO.
We are actively working with the ecosystem to ensure that it's not just PayPal we are securing, but we are trying to secure all of the internet. No conversation about technology is complete without a conversation on AI, and we are doing various things with respect to AI. Before I come to AI, let me talk a bit about some of the work that we are doing in tokenization and a few other places. We have used tokenization as a methodology in express checkout for many years now. As the industry standardized tokenization, we've taken those standards and included that in our platform, and that has given us a ton of leverage, too. Identity is changing in big ways around us. Implicit and explicit multi-factor identity and new ways of signing on in a way that it is convenient.
Bill mentioned how interactions are moving to all the devices around you, and as this happens, it doesn't have a keyboard or a mouse for you to interact with. To identify yourself with those platforms needs sophisticated backend and great experiences that can bring it all together. We're working in many areas of identity there. In distributed ledger technologies. Blockchain is very popular, and we are conducting a few very early experiments to actually experience what blockchain is all about and see if those capabilities are something that are the best option to use in the problems that we are solving. In terms of artificial intelligence, there are various areas that we're taking all of that data we have and applying it in terms of intelligent insights, decisions, and actions. Number 1, in infrastructure.
We have moved from a manually managed infrastructure to an automated infrastructure to now building an autonomous infrastructure. This is a self-healing mechanism, a self-managing ecosystem where all of our hardware, it manages itself on a continuous basis. We also apply these to business processes, fraud and risk management, and customer service as well. Some examples that you saw earlier today. We're also applying ML and AI in security. There are a lot of unknowns in security. Threat factors are continuing to increase, and the way we are making those unknowns known is through investing in great telemetry and signals, processing real-time streams of data, and then ensuring that we are using those signals to know exactly what's going on on the internet and what's going on in our ecosystem as well. That gives us a leg up from a security perspective. Last but not the least, ambient experiences.
You've heard a lot today about ambient experiences already. Bill did a great job in talking about how the interactions are moving to every device around you. Most of you have taken a rideshare, when you take a rideshare, when do you pay? It just happens automatically. Actually, we power many of those platforms. We are in a world today, we are beginning to interact not just with the devices that we hold, but with refrigerators that have connectivity, with microwave ovens that have connectivity, with cars that have connectivity, with televisions that have connectivity. Digital identity, subscription economy, immediacy, all of these are driving experiences in a completely new direction.
The powerful platform that we have built with the building blocks that I mentioned, that cover not just technology and experiences, but compliance and risk, help us build amazing experience to serve our customers in all these areas. I'm truly excited about the technology platform we have built so far, the journey we've been on in the last three years, and also the direction, the trajectory, and momentum we have going forward. Thank you all for being here today. At this point in time, I want to introduce Leah Sweet, who is our VP of Global Design, Delivery, and Operations, and she's going to talk to you about go-to-market strategies globally and how we develop and launch new and innovative experiences efficiently at scale. Thank you.
All right. Hello, everyone. One more presentation till John tells you the numbers. I know you can hardly wait. Okay. You've heard about, from my colleagues here today, about the vision, the products, the partnerships, and the technology. I'm going to talk to you about how in the world did we get this 20,000-person organization to do this, and how are we going to keep doing it as we go forward. Let's start off with a little bit of stepping back and talking about where we were just a handful of years ago. PayPal was in a situation where when we were thinking about product delivery and about partnerships, we were not thinking about it from the standpoint of an end customer's perspective. We were internally focused, and we built a lot of our capabilities based upon the ideas of a few folks in a white-boarded room.
Coming up with some probably very intelligent ideas, not clarity on the problems they were trying to solve. Those capabilities were oftentimes built in such a way that they worked for one market, not on multiple markets. Every time we had to go into a different market, we had to make changes and almost start over from scratch. Finally, when we rolled these things out, we quickly moved on to the next thing and didn't focus on the quality and the efficiency of the products that we delivered. It was a hard pill to swallow when we stepped back and took a look at ourselves and how we delivered. We made some fundamental changes to how we do things to be able to correct these mistakes of the past. What have we done?
We've rallied ourselves around four key pillars of how we think and act as a company. These are best practices of the world's best technology companies. We didn't just come up with these on our own. We went out and spoke with the broader ecosystem of companies to understand those groups, Facebook, Google, the various players out there who are killing it on the technology and on the innovation front, to say, "What do you do, and how do you do it?" We took those best practices, and we brought them into PayPal. Those best practices specifically revolve around some critical points. First and foremost, we have 20,000 people in the company, but we were not one team with one mission. Dan brought that to us. Thank you.
Critically important, diverse opinions, diverse perspectives, diverse approaches are great when they can be channeled towards a vision, that's what we've done. We focus on the customer as our number one priority. We listen to the customer, I'll show you soon in the upcoming slides some specific examples of how we actually go and understand a customer's pain points before we even write any code or come up with any product solutions. We make sure what we deliver is open. It's open for the ecosystem. It's open for our partners. We want as many customers as possible. We want as many partners as possible. That is our goal, we build our products and our ideas with that principle in mind.
We also have some core tenets in how we build to make sure what we design is global from day one, not global 10 years down the road. Part and parcel to everything we do is we have to make sure we build it with quality from the beginning, that we build in the processes and the structures we need to make it efficient. I'm going to talk to you about each one of these. Before I do that, I want to walk you into just the last three years, since we separated from eBay. Since we separated from eBay, this was really our moment of reflection, having to take a step back and say, "What do we do?" We took 2015, we actually spent a significant amount of time in 2015 going out and understanding our customers' and our partners' pain points.
We were delivering a lot of capabilities at the same time, it was absolutely imperative for us to really be able to say, "What are we trying to be in this ecosystem that Amit showed you, that group? Where are we trying to play, and how are we trying to exist?" We started executing significantly in 2016 on those strategies. 2017 is our transition to durable teams, I'll talk to you about that, what that means. Durable teams is the concept we are using to be able to say we want to organize ourselves, our 20,000 people, around the concepts of solving customer pain points. We put ourselves into 2 different types of organizational structures. When I say we, I mean not just the 4,500 engineers that Sri talked about.
I mean our salespeople, our operations people, our marketing people, our product and engineering people, and every part of the organization focuses on the customer and, or they focus on the platform. The platform solutions, as you've heard Sri talk about, are fundamental to how we deliver anything. Getting a comprehensive point of view about our platforms was absolutely imperative for us to be able to deliver these. You could not have delivered the risk platform if you didn't have lawyers, the legal team in there, the compliance team in there, the operations team in there, and thinking about how that platform needed to function. That's what we've done with every single platform and every single thing we deliver. The same thing is true with respect to our customer segment solutions.
We have gone through, and John touched on this, and broken out our different possible partners and consumers into segments with the intention of saying, "We're not going to build a solution that is the same for everybody, except at the edges, we're going to make sure we hear what a small business wants. We give them solutions that work for them. We hear what a large enterprise wants, we give them solutions for them. We hear what a digital native wants, what a Venmo consumer or a financially underserved consumer wants. Our solutions are designed thinking about the needs of that segment and making sure that we actually craft those solutions to work for them, built on platforms that work across all of them. Let me actually take you into an example on our platform services and solutions teams around a video.
One of the things we like to do when it comes to discovery processes is we actually, as John talked about, we like to go into a location and really understand what that customer experiences. We had a situation where we had our Xoom product, which is our remittances product. We found that most of the folks that were thinking about the remittances product were thinking about it from the standpoint of the person sending the money, not the person receiving the money. Why were we thinking about it that way? Well, most of our folks that were writing the code and coming up with the product ideas were senders of money versus necessarily being the people on the end that needed to get the remittances. There wasn't a fundamental understanding of what are the problems those people on the end, the remittance receivers, actually experience.
We actually went through a process of sending folks to Mexico, meeting with 27 different customers in Mexico to understand what are some of the problems that they have on remittances. I want to walk you through a specific video that talks to you about what they experienced. What was really fascinating from the team that went down to Mexico and talked with those customers was that they learned things that they never would have conceived of. They have to get on a bus for two hours to go and get money, and they run out of money at the location they go to pick it up, so they have to go back day after day after day. They have a bad phone signal, and that's the only way they get the code to be able to type it in.
Those types of examples are things that you don't think of when you're in an executive boardroom or in a conference room on a whiteboard. Those are the kind of things that you think of when you talk to the people that have the problems, and you understand the issues they have, and it fundamentally changes how you build your products. That is a systemic activity we have incorporated into every single one of our durable teams, is they discover with the segment, or they discover with the broader customer base, if they're a platform, what problems they need to solve. An example of we've been talking about today of one of our best problem statement solutions is One Touch. You've heard the numbers multiple times, 96 million customers, 9.1 million merchants, 71% of the IR 100. Why?
This was solving a fundamental problem that we heard from our customers. Not only that, but as we went into it, we made sure that it not only solved the problems of the consumers with a fast One Touch experience for seamless checkout, it solved some fundamental problems of merchants as well. What's one of those problems? When a merchant has a customer come to their site and checks out as a guest, they have no idea who that customer is. With the One Touch experience, we are able to help that merchant understand who that customer is. We have that ability with them to help them know what type of habitual or not customers they have. It's a huge strategic advantage for the merchant, and it's a huge strategic advantage for PayPal.
Another example of One Touch and how understanding the problem you're trying to solve makes a significant difference in terms of the usage of that product is on the One Touch acquisition front. One Touch is not just about seamless checkout experiences. One Touch also is about seamless onboarding and acquisition. We have a case study here. They made me take the names of the retailers off, but this is real. We had a case study with several retailers where we did an A/B test. We actually integrated One Touch into the apps, the downloaded mobile apps of those customers, and then they had apps where they didn't have One Touch integrated. The way that it works is when you download the app, if you have One Touch in the app, you just say, "Select with PayPal," and it signs you up for that application.
You don't have to type in your name, you don't have to type in your address, you don't have to type in your credit card information. It's linked. In the case, of course, where One Touch was not there, you had to type all that information in. By simply having that acquisition feature there, you can see the funnel, two times as many people did purchases. Two times. Three times increase in repeat users simply by the fact that they had that automated sign-up in that application. This is the power of understanding the problems your customers have and incorporating them into your solutions. The next fundamental tenet has to do with how we approach our platforms.
Sri gave you an awesome view from a technology perspective of how we approach them, there's also the aspect with our platforms that they have some critical tenets from an architectural design standpoint. They have to be open, which means we have to design them in such a way so that you have APIs and SDKs, convenient integration points. They have to be reusable across multiple contexts. Our identity platform, if you think about our identity platform, where did that start? That started by you going to paypal.com, typing in your name, user ID, and typing in your password. Now, we could easily have kept it at that, but you saw the Facebook Messenger experience that Bill talked about. You saw the Google Pay experience as well. Both of those are using that exact same identity platform.
It is offering those capabilities up in a way that you probably never would have thought of when they initially wrote the identity platform, but they wrote it in such a way that allows them to easily represent those capabilities in a brand-new context. We did not have to build a bunch of new stuff to do that. That makes it faster, more efficient, easier to get these problems out there. That's about 2 years. We would have then rolled out U.K. and Australia because that's our normal natural ramp next to. U.K. and Australia, that would have been another 2 years, and then we would have moved to the other countries, or we would have stopped and said, "You know what? That's enough. We can't do anymore. It's too much time." Not the way that we're approaching it today. 145, one day.
Finally, we're focusing on quality and efficiency. Sri talked quite a bit about what we're doing from a technology standpoint. We also are changing our instrumentation. We're changing our processes. We're changing our metrics. We're changing how we're holding people accountable for what is success when they roll out a product. By doing that, we've seen a 75% reduction in daily failures of services on our site by simply asking people to pay attention and holding them accountable to pay attention to it. We've also seen a 40% faster time to market. That faster time to market is all of these things together. It is the power of the platform. It is the focus from across the enterprise on a durable team that actually works together side by side instead of tossing things over the wall.
Significant increase, 40% is a target, but we're seeing a lot of places where it's much faster than that. Finally, quality. Not only have we been focusing on building new capabilities, we've spent a huge amount of time going back and making sure the stuff we've already put out there works. You can see here from this chart that from 2013 on, we were pretty much trending in line with the, as our transaction volume grew, our contact volume into our call centers, our operations support, those were going at the same pace. Beginning 2016, when we put these processes in place and these new approaches, you can see we bent that curve. We've been able to actually reduce our call center call volume by 7% in the last year. At the same time, we added 1 billion transactions. That is the power of the transformation.
To wrap this up, not only have we delivered some amazing experiences and products, we have fundamentally changed how we function as a company, and we will continue to be able to do this year after year. I will now turn it over to John Rainey to walk you through the stuff you really are excited about. All right. Thanks.
Thank you, Leah. Thank all of you. We know that you all have demands on your time, your presence here really makes this the success that it is, we do appreciate that. You've heard from a lot of us today about the strategy that we have, the path forward, some of the products, the merchant and consumer value proposition, I'm sure you're all wondering what are the financial implications of this? I'm going to get there eventually. I think that if there's one key takeaway from my message today, I would say it's this, that in this fast-growing, competitive environment that we've talked about, we're not only going to sustain our financial performance, we're going to accelerate it. We'll accelerate our financial performance going forward. My talk today is really organized around three ways that we'll do that.
I'm going to discuss our growth opportunities, both in terms of the partnerships, which you've heard from Jim and Bill about already, also how we approach the addressable market that Dan talked about at the very beginning of the presentation. That's different for depending upon the type of market that we go into. I'm also going to talk about cost and how we scale our platform, do it at a very low marginal cost, as we've done in the last year. Lastly, I'm going to discuss capital allocation, and then I'll finish it out with updates on our financial projections going forward. At separation, we were very clearly a high-growth company, there were still question marks about us. We did not have a proven track record. There were questions about competition, about our ability to handle the competitive environment.
It seemed in the fall of 2015, with every single pay announcement that came out, our stock price declined. People read into that what the impact could be on PayPal. There were concerns about our relationships with the rest of the financial ecosystem, the issuers, the networks. There were questions about our margin profile. Would we be able to grow but do it in a profitable manner? There was an overhang on our business around credit. Credit is a fantastic part of our business, there were concerns that we were too reliant on it for our earnings, or that it was too capital intensive. There were a lot of questions about it. There were even questions, I think, as we were unproven as a management team. Right? For heaven's sake, you hired a CFO from the airline business. What did we do to address those questions?
One thing is that in the last 3 years, we've added more customers to our platform than at any point in time in our history. Last year, we added almost $30 million customers to our platform. This year, we're on pace to improve upon that. We had revenue growth in each of the last 2 years of 21% on a currency-neutral basis. We've seen our operating income in the last year increase 27%, and we've expanded our operating margin, and we'll do that again this year. We've had consistent, strong earnings per share growth. What did we do? We added $66 million net new actives to our platform. We announced major partnerships with 7 of the top 10 issuers and networks. We had 19% compounded annual revenue growth since our separation.
Last year, we had the very best cost performance in the history of our company, demonstrating the scalability of our platform at a low marginal cost. Last fall, we announced a major partnership and transaction with Synchrony Financial, where they would buy our U.S. consumer credit receivables portfolio for $6 billion, and we announced a partnership with them going forward. Lastly, we returned almost $4 billion to our shareholders during that period of time. Today, there's a new question, right? There's a question that people have about what the next 3 to 5 years looks like from a financial perspective. How are we going to be able to transition off of the operating agreement with eBay? Where will our growth come from? I think in part, it's dependent upon our partnership opportunity.
You've seen various slides today similar to this, these are some of our major partnerships, Facebook, Google, Mastercard, Chase. Some of the very best companies in the world. This is a slide of those partners that we had 3 years ago. When we ask where our growth will come from, will absolutely come from the partnerships that we have and those that are yet to be announced. By being an open technology agnostic digital payments platform, we have the ability to partner with any company in the world. Just as importantly, they have a willingness to partner with us because of what we can bring them, which Jim talked to you about earlier. I want to put a finer point on this growth, though. If you look at the slide, the left side of the chart is what we call merchant services.
It's the 87% of our business that is not eBay. This is the volume growth in the last year, 33%. If you look to the right side of the slide, Bill talked about this, if you take our top 20 merchants, which is roughly about the size of our eBay volume today, they grew at 42%. I'll decompose that a step further. If you just look at those merchants that are listed there, they grew at 60%, 60%, versus eBay. As we grow with these, the fastest-growing, largest technology platforms and marketplaces out there, it will make our reliance on eBay be much, much less by the time that we get to 2020. I want to shift to how we're approaching the addressable market.
We have three distinct categories here, and they all are individual and unique, and our approach in each of those markets is just as individual and unique. We have core developed markets, under-penetrated, and rapidly emerging, I want to talk about each of those. Core developed markets. These are the markets that we have the full suite of products that you've already heard from earlier today in for the most part. These are the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Germany. There's 650 million digital users in that market, and we have roughly one in three of those digital users is a PayPal customer. Here's the thing, this is a market that is growing 1%-2% per year. We fully expect that in some of these markets, our penetration will get up to be as much as 50%.
Net new actives is not where we're going to get our growth here. Our growth in these markets will come through engagement. Engagement through things like omnichannel offerings with iZettle, consumer financial services that you heard from John earlier about, Venmo. We'll focus on engagement in these markets. Importantly, we expect that by 2022, that mobile will be 50% of our volume in these markets. Moving to under-penetrated. These are markets that we have a strong business in today, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, but we have a very small penetration rate. It's a market of 1.6 billion digital users. If you look at our product, it's mostly cross-border for the most part. The growth rate of this market is 8%-9%.
If we can get to even 3% or 4% penetration, we're talking about tens of millions of consumers that can come to our platform, and that's a significant amount of growth for us going forward. Importantly, as we think about this market, we expect that by 2022, 85% of our volume will be mobile. Lastly, moving to rapidly emerging markets. These are markets that tend to be more fragmented or have very individualized regulatory requirements. Our strategy here is a partnership one. It's partnering with local companies to facilitate cross-border commerce. A good example of this is what we've recently announced with M-Pesa in Africa. Again, here, we expect that mobile will be 50% of our volume in these markets. Moving to cost efficiencies. The graph in front of you highlights two things.
On the left side, we illustrate the percentage of our costs that are transaction-related or volume-related, and what we refer to as other OpEx or non-volume related costs. You can see how the composition of our cost has changed over time. The important point on this slide is on the right side. The right side illustrates the marginal cost of our growth. If you look in 2015 and 2016, the way to read this is that for every incremental dollar of revenue that we brought in, our other OpEx, our non-volume related costs, if you will, went up roughly $0.25. Last year, for every incremental dollar of revenue that we brought in, that number went up $0.12. A full $0.01 of that was related to acquisitions.
Said differently, on an organic basis, we our cost went up $0.10 for every $1 of revenue. This is the way to scale our business going forward. I'm going to give you three quick examples to demonstrate how we can do that. The first is around customer support. The top graph here shows what we call our contact rate. Our contact rate is the number of contacts that we get from a customer divided by the number of transactions that we have. Roughly 1% of the time, there is some issue that requires a customer to contact us. We have roughly 60 million-65 million contacts a year.
I think putting this in a slightly different context, as Leah just described, if you think about the 66 million, almost 70 million customers that we've added in the last three years, despite adding all of those customers, the absolute number of our contacts has gone down. We're doing this by focusing on the root cause of issues that customers have. We have a cross-functional team where we work with the product development team and the engineers to really go look in and discover why are customers having issues. We've talked about password reset being one. A year and a half ago, password reset was our number two issue or number two reason that a customer would contact us. It's not even in the top 10 today. If you think about the cost of these customer contacts, every single time we're contacted by a customer, it costs us $4.60.
$4.60. That's the marginal cost that goes away if we don't have that customer contact. We've made dramatic improvements there. One thing that we focused on is how customers contact us. Today, 77% of the contacts from customers are through phone. It's a very inefficient and often frustrating way for a customer to deal with an issue. One thing that we're moving to this year is we're rolling out chat. Bill talked about chatbots. That's one thing we're doing in some of our products, but we're also propping up offshore a chat service. Why chat is important is because you can take advantage of lower cost areas of the world to serve that customer, and you can also handle multiple customers at the same point in time. Just as our cost per contact is $4.60 today, that was $5 two years ago.
We expect that to continue to come down, and importantly, we expect the contact rate to come down as well. This is one of the ways that we'll demonstrate that we can grow our platform and do it at a very low marginal cost. The second area is a line from our P&L that we call product development, but it really encompasses much more. I would say the way to think about this is take the last two presentations, Sri and Leah, both how we develop product, but also the cost to support that product. In 2018, we'll have a 25% improvement in just our platform cost. If you look at where this is today, best in class for a platform like us is around $0.03 or $0.04 a transaction.
We've made tremendous improvements, you heard from the others that came up here and spoke. We've got a great plan in place to continue to reduce this is absolutely one of the key areas where, again, we can grow our platform and become more efficient, but also, very importantly, increase the throughput, our ability to develop more product, to be more available to our customers. The last area, not as interesting, but a very important one is G&A. I want to spend a moment just so that you understand what's happened here. If you look at 2015 to 2016, I think it's very important to understand this is a time period where we were really coming out of another company. We did an IPO, and a lot of the G&A functions we needed to prop up.
We spent a lot of money in this area in the early quarters. We also spent a lot of money in compliance. Compliance was probably our single largest investment that we made in the last year. We view that as a competitive advantage as we look at what it takes to roll out product across the world. Sri talked about RegTech. This is something that gives us an advantage versus our competitors. This is an investment that will pay off for years. Very significantly, we don't have to continue to do that. These costs as a % of revenue, we expect will come down over time. If you roll all that together and you look at that non-transaction related expense and the growth of that, we expect on an organic basis to stay in the mid-single digits.
This graph shows a slight inflection up because we have an assumption about acquisitions in there. I'll talk more about that in just a second. If you take that and then you overlay what our expectation is around our transaction margin growth, which we expect to continue in the double-digit year-over-year increase range, that allows us to not only keep margins where they are, but to actually grow them. That's while reinvesting in the business. I'll talk more in a second, but we expect our operating margins to go up. The last area that I want to talk about is capital allocation. The graph in front of you shows how we've allocated capital over the last three years. M&A, funding our credit business, CapEx, share repurchases.
I think it's very important to remember that we've pivoted now with this Synchrony agreement to where we don't need to fund credit as much as we used to. That gives us a lot more flexibility and freedom to allocate dollars towards alternatives that are higher returning. In the past, as the graph shows, 30%-40% of our cash each year went to fund credit. I want to spend a moment on that because we still have a credit business. We have an international consumer business, and we've got a thriving merchant lending business. They are fantastic parts of our platform and growing quickly.
The takeaway that I want you to understand about credit is that if those get so big, so large that, once again, they begin to detract or take away from other things or better returning alternatives, as we've done in the past, we will absolutely pursue an asset light off-balance sheet transaction again to make sure that we preserve, that we let every $1 of capital sort of fight for itself, compete for itself, and allocate it to the highest returning alternatives. Another pillar of our strategy is around acquisitions. I won't read the entire slide to you, but I think there's a couple elements up here that are important in terms of how we think about acquisitions. One is that it's got to create value. We're not going to do a deal just for the sake of it. We look for strong value creation.
It's got to have compelling strategic rationale, and it's got to be accretive to our growth profile. A good example of that is the acquisition we just did with iZettle. With iZettle, we have basically a best-in-class omnichannel offering, and very importantly for our SMB segment. You can see that the opportunity here is to cross-sell. We can cross-sell iZettle to existing PayPal merchants and PayPal to existing iZettle merchants. Very importantly, we can combine an omnichannel offering and go out and expand that to markets that iZettle's not even in today. We believe this is a very compelling opportunity for us. We expect this transaction will be, or that iZettle will be profitable in 2020. I'll spend a moment on this in terms of the first two years, as you see on the right side of the graph there, we expect some dilution.
We expect on a non-GAAP basis, $0.01 of dilution this year. Next year we expect $0.06-$0.08 of dilution. I'm very excited about what this does for us with an omnichannel offering. You take all that together, in terms of how we think about capital. This is our strategy going forward. The left side shows the balance sheet that we will have. At the end of the year, given everything that we know right now, we would expect cash, our balance sheet, to be about $15 billion. $15 billion. Our intention to allocate that first starts with we want to maintain an investment-grade rating. We're going to balance investment in the business with margin expansion. We'll continue to look at asset light or off-balance sheet transactions for credit. We're going to target M&A, acquiring companies, spending $1 billion-$3 billion a year.
$1 billion-$3 billion. We've got more specificity on the amount of cash that we expect to return to shareholders. 40%-50% of our free cash flow each year. What does all this mean for our medium-term guidance? In 2016, at Investor Day, as this column shows, we said that we expect over the medium term to have mid-20% growth in TPV. We expect revenue growth of 15% and stable to growing margins with free cash flow growing in line with revenue. We updated that in October, and the only significant change was around revenue. We increased our revenue guidance 16%-17%. Since this happened, since this guidance, we've had the eBay announcement and we completed the asset light transaction, and the asset light transaction was not contemplated in here.
When we look at our new guidance that we expect going forward, slight tweaks here in terms of the different categories, but this is a 3- to 5-year outlook, we provided that because importantly, that covers the period that we transition with eBay. We expect revenue growth of 17%-18%. We're going to expand our operating margins. We expect EPS growth 20%, approximately 20% compounded annually, with free cash flow yield being 20-plus %. This includes our assumptions about capital allocation as well. I want to thank all of you for being here. I hope that you have found our material today compelling. We've got, we believe, a great strategy. I think we believe we've got a great financial plan going forward. I hope you also understand our conviction and our ability to achieve that as well.
Now I'm going to ask Dan, Bill, and Gabrielle to join me on stage and we'll field some questions.
Thanks.
Great. Well, thanks so much for your patience and to wait for John to give updated guidance. All of you know, there are actually USB drives in the back of the room when you exit that will have all the presentations loaded. To the extent that you didn't catch something, you'll be able to get that. Later today, we expect to post online as well. I'm going to start with a question for Dan. Outside the U.S., what regions are top priority as you go after 1 billion consumers globally?
I think John did a good job explaining some of that in his presentation. If you think about the developed markets, we have call it about a quarter billion or so users now. There's a whole next gen of markets that we intend to enter. Those would be countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, potential of China as well. Those are big opportunity markets for us. We'll be patient in those markets. We'll develop the right way, but there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. We can do some of that organically. We can do some of that, as Jim mentioned, with partners. We could JV, we could buy in some of those places. I think there's a good amount of opportunity in those particular markets.
Great, thank you. This one's for Bill. How is the Braintree technology stack different from, say, Adyen, and how is the PayPal value proposition differentiated?
Sure, yeah. You heard Amit go through some of this. We were always very focused on the front-end buying experience. It's just a fundamentally different problem to solve. Giving better access to the dial tone, there's a lot of players out there that can do that, but it's not super differentiated. As you look at other players in the space, I think giving easier access to dial tone is great, but it's not the same thing as solving the front-end customer problem, which is how do you drive up conversion? This was what we were focused on at Braintree from the very early days.
It's why we built Venmo, it's why we built Venmo Touch, it's why we joined PayPal, because PayPal was the only place in the world where you had this two-sided platform of consumers and merchants, the ability to control the experience, and you've seen us deliver that with One Touch, and the kinds of conversion rates that you saw. I think, in a world where others are thinking about giving access to back-end payments, we're just playing a fundamentally different sport. We're giving access to customers. In a world where you're giving access to back-end payments processes, merchants are beating you over the head over one or two basis points because it's all about cost compression. In a world where you deliver customers at twice the rate of anything else, that's highly differentiated, and that's really what the Braintree focus has been, and it's why we joined PayPal.
You see that coming through. I think you see that in the PayPal results, overall. You see it in Braintree results. Even as much of a platform as Braintree has become and as deeply integrated as it is with PayPal, the premise of the PayPal brand, the buying experience is what we can do with PayPal and One Touch and Venmo and all these great consumer experiences that you get through Braintree. Braintree, even though it's become quite a material platform for us, quite a significant platform for us, revenue at Braintree is still growing 54% plus year-on-year. Even on a big denominator, it's still growing quite tremendously. I think that's because of that competitive differentiation, that it's about the buying experience.
You see that with the kinds of merchants that run on Braintree, merchants that are trying to solve for great next-gen mobile buying experiences, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Snapchat, Facebook, Google. These are the merchants that look at what we do with Braintree, and see the value in that differentiated customer connection.
Thanks, Bill. This one's for John. There's a strong debate in the market about exact eBay dilution. Can you talk a little more about what kinds of costs you can take out, and what are the biggest areas of cost take out?
Sure. I covered some of that in the presentation. I think it's important to understand that if you think about the eBay business today, and just take something like risk, okay? The most complicated transaction for us from a risk perspective is an unknown seller and an unknown buyer. Right? That's very often what happens on an eBay platform. We incur higher losses on a transaction like that. If you're Macy's and you're selling a product to someone that shops all the time at PayPal, that's not as complicated from a risk perspective. When we look at our various cost buckets, risk being one, we have a higher percentage of losses on eBay than we do the rest of our platform, disproportionately higher. Customer support is another area.
Because of sometimes the nature of that transaction, we see higher call volume into our contact centers because of that. As I suggested, that's almost $5 for every one of those contacts. When we look at our cost structure, we think that some of that will just naturally come down as we transition or are less reliant on eBay. It's not just cost. Revenue is a big piece of it. I think, to put it in a slightly different way, if you look at our guidance that we just provided, our revenue growth that we're expecting now, if you were to compare that to the revenue growth in our last medium-term guidance, it's $2 billion higher five years from now. Moreover, that assumes that does not have the U.S. consumer credit portfolio in it.
That was $1 billion of revenue that was in our previous guidance. Said differently, on an apples-to-apples basis, our revenue is $3 billion higher. Our expectation is, anyway, going forward, than what it was before. It's because of a lot of the things that you've already heard about today. It's not just a cost piece, it's revenue growth as well.
Thanks, John. Dan, why not issue a PayPal Cash Card for all stored balances so that you can gain acceptance at the physical POS?
Yeah. The PayPal Cash Card, as you've heard from all the different presentations, we're very targeted in the value propositions and the solutions that we're trying to introduce into the market. We don't believe there's an average customer anymore, we used to develop for the average customer, which meant that we basically developed for no one in particular. The Cash Card is developed with other product features that John Kunze mentioned in his presentation, at those that are unbanked or underserved by the current financial institutions. For those who are unbanked or underserved, that's a perfect value proposition and solution to bring them into the digital economy, to afford them the benefits and opportunities associated by being involved in that way. It'll save them money. It'll enable them to have better financial health, to save more.
For those who are currently banked, that isn't the value proposition that they're looking for. In fact, we think that working with the banks, working with the networks, that we can actually create different and better value propositions that are more relevant for those segments, like the rewards points that we were talking about, where we can take the best of their assets, the best of our platform assets, put them together, and create a value proposition for those segments of the market. We have different names for all the different consumer segments that are much more powerful than we could do alone, or that the banks could do alone as well.
Thanks, Dan. Bill, the growth on non-eBay marketplaces and with other partners is very strong. How do you think about that business and additional unit economics there?
Well, first of all, as I mentioned, we think there's a lot more opportunity around that, particularly as the restrictions in the operating agreement fall away. We get to serve marketplaces out there that would've had restrictions applied to them under the operating agreement. We get to serve those fully without those. We think there's a ton more that we can do. From an economics perspective, those are places where we're bringing buyers in at higher conversion rates. We're bringing sellers in to those marketplaces. We're helping those sellers get funds out of those marketplaces quickly. Those marketplaces and channel partners oftentimes are the places where our differentiation is most on display.
It's a very nicely profitable segment for us because it's where our differentiation and our two-sided platform shines through the most because we're bringing not only buyers, we're bringing sellers, and we're really helping to amplify those other marketplaces and those channel partners. It's not only a very high-growth segment for us that we think as we become sort of unfettered in our ability to fully serve that segment, we think there's tons more that we can do, and it's very nicely profitable for us.
Great.
If I can add just a couple of things to that. One, obviously, we can't do certain things until the end of the operating agreement, but that doesn't mean that you won't see us announcing different things with different players as we get closer and closer to that stage. We're under a number of discussions that are going extremely well, and we have a lot of partnerships already with these largest marketplaces. Second thing I'd point out, and I don't want to downplay this, is we are very close partners with eBay. The reason we're very close partners with eBay is we both have a mutual interest in serving the small merchants that exist on that marketplace. Those small businesses count on PayPal. They have integrated PayPal into their back-office systems.
They count, as Bill talked about, everyone talked about in their slides, about driving growth and sales to those small businesses. eBay and PayPal both realize that the closer we are together, the better off we can serve our mutual customers together. It would not shock me to see that relationship getting closer and closer as we go forward. I think there's a narrative that we're drifting away from each other. I'd submit that there's a narrative that as we move forward, you'll see us moving closer and closer to each other in numerous different ways. I think we are both quite dependent on each other in serving those mutual customers, and I look forward to working closely with eBay to go do that.
Thanks, Dan. This one's for John. When you talk about margin expansion, can you quantify it in a little more detail? How low do you think the incremental cost of transactions can go over time?
One of the things that we wrestle with the most as a management team is how much, or the trade-off between margin expansion and reinvesting in the business. We could easily expand margins a lot more than what we're doing today. We also know that we need to make investments for the future. We need to be investing in things like Venmo that are the next leg of growth two, three, four, five years from now. It's finding that balance, and I think that we've navigated it pretty well thus far, but you should expect to see margins go up and go up every single year. That's the path that we're on. We'll do that while continuing to reinvest in the business.
In terms of the marginal cost, I would say if you look at it in terms of the incremental OpEx that I talked about earlier, the $0.10-$0.13ish range on an organic basis is something that's fairly easy for us to do. Obviously, acquisitions will add to that. That's a sustainable thing that if we're achieving that kind of incremental cost growth and growing our transaction margins at a double-digit rate, then we can continue to expand margins. I think getting much below that, we're getting to a point where you're starting to do unnatural acts and starve the business of investment. We don't really want to go much below that.
Yeah, I'd just add to it. Look, we have a huge opportunity in the market, and we want to invest in the business to take advantage of that growth. When John showed the iZettle charts that he did up there, part of that next year's cost is that we're going to invest heavily in that business. We want to grow it. We want to expand the markets that it's in. We want to take full advantage of that acquisition because it is so important to small businesses that they have an omnichannel solution. We think we have a best-in-class solution right now, and we want to invest in it. It's easy to grow operating margins. As I've said many times, the operating margins of this business want to go up.
Our thing that we do as a management team is ensure that they do go up every year, but that we invest appropriately back in the business to seize the growth opportunities that are manifest in front of us.
Thanks, Dan. Another one for you. You talk about helping merchants compete with Amazon. Can you talk about Amazon Pay as competition, and can you also talk about offsetting that potentially with your ability to add Amazon as a marketplace customer?
Yep. Why do I get the hard ones? Look, I think I've answered this question in a number of different forums. I'll quickly repeat myself. One, if you look at the total addressable market out there, and you look at our share of that market, we are just beginning. There is no one competitor out there that's going to take the vast majority of that market. We are extraordinarily well-positioned to be a market leader in there, and we're just scratching the surface. I don't care how many competitive announcements come out there, our opportunity and the unique assets, scale, capabilities, scope of services, the innovation we have, the platform we have, will maintain our market leadership. My bet would be we widen our market leadership. When it comes to Amazon Pay, we have a tremendous amount of respect for Amazon.
If you talk to any retailer out there, from small to large, the existential threat that they worry about are what is this big change moving to digital and mobile, and how do they compete in a world where Amazon is getting bigger? For the overwhelming majority of those merchants, PayPal is that must-have digital platform to enable them to have the capabilities that somebody the scale of Amazon can have, and a much smaller merchant can now take the scale we have, the capabilities we can give them to grow their business. Amazon Pay struggles against that. Can they really get a ton of merchant acceptance when all that data and information is going to arguably the biggest threat that any of those retailers have?
I believe that our platform and our whole strategy and the solutions that we're providing right now and the capabilities, is to enable a thriving ecosystem of retail throughout the world, and to level that playing field. In terms of potential partnerships with Amazon, I always get myself in trouble anytime I even mention anything on this. I'll just say, my view on our ability and our capabilities are that they're attractive to the vast majority of retails, platforms, marketplaces out there, because we offer a wide swath of segments of the market. We have a wide swath of geographies around the world, and we are typically strong in a place, at least, where there may be some gaps that others have. I see the potential of us working with any potential merchant or platform or marketplace out there, but we'll see where all that goes.
Great. Thank you. Bill, can you talk a little more about PayPal as a distribution channel? Some of the advantages you spoke to, are they only available for Braintree customers?
No, this is across the PayPal platform. It is the primary way we deliver to our merchant customers. This notion of we can light up new experiences without merchants having to do work, certainly some of these concepts we started with Braintree, but we've done these things across the PayPal environment. When you look at the stats we gave of 9 million-plus PayPal merchants now having PayPal One Touch, our ability to take Venmo across all PayPal merchants in the U.S., us taking Google to PayPal merchants wherever they see Google Pay to wherever you see PayPal, provided you've linked PayPal and Google Pay together. This is the full set of places where you would see PayPal, that we have these types of capabilities.
It's not limited to just Braintree, it's across the PayPal ecosystem, and that's why we think it is a fundamental advantage we have versus others that are having to distribute by one merchant by merchant, that we can go deploy to millions of merchants at a time. It's not limited. It is across our ecosystem.
Great. Thank you. John, you talked a little bit about capital allocation and your goals. Can you expand on that now?
Sure. I presume that question was written before I went over that slide. Look, I think the two major changes are that we're going to allocate 40%-50% of free cash back to shareholders. Previously, we said that we would just offset the dilution from share-based compensation and be opportunistic beyond that. The other thing is that we've got a target of $1 billion-$3 billion a year that we're going to spend to acquire growth companies. That's sort of how we think about free cash flow on an annual basis. I talked about on the slide that if you look at our free cash flow over the time period that we're talking about, it's anywhere between $4 billion-$6+ billion a year of cash generation. We do have $15 billion on our balance sheet.
You could expect us to maybe see higher percentages in the earlier time periods on each of those. Fundamentally, we as a management team, we're going to allocate capital to create shareholder value. We're not going to necessarily rush out and do a deal just because we said that we've got to do $1 billion-$3 billion of acquisitions or go spend it all on a share buyback. We're going to allocate that capital to create the most shareholder value. We feel that we've got the luxury to be measured about that, and we've done that. I think we've demonstrated pretty well, based upon how we've allocated capital thus far, that it's created shareholder value.
Great. Thank you.
I think balance sheet is one element. I think how we're going to be successful going forward, we've got now the ability to do more and more internally. You looked at Sri's presentation, we were doing eight software releases a year. You think about how much innovation you can put out into the market when you're doing eight releases a year. It's little. You have to rely actually on acquisitions to be your innovation engine. When you're doing tens of thousands of releases every year, it's very different. We're doing a tremendous amount of innovation, development, and product introduction internally. We've got talent now that's taking advantage of that. Our balance sheet also enables that guidance that we gave for us to feel very comfortable with that.
It gives us a lot of flexibility, both in looking at best-in-class assets that we might bring in, and return back to shareholders. We feel really good about what we can do with that balance sheet. If you look at it, we still have a good amount of capital that we can hold in reserve to be opportunistic one way or another. We think looking at it in terms of $1 billion-$3 billion a year of acquisitions that could come in, then returning 40%-50% of that annual free cash flow back to shareholders is a good, reasonable balance.
Great, thanks. We have time for one last question, I'm going to try to put a few together. It's for Dan. Can you talk about how you think about geo expansion and how you think about the opportunities going forward? Within that, are there opportunities to work with governments to help increase the use of electronic currency to reduce cash usage?
To reduce what?
Cash usage.
Cash usage. Yeah. Okay. The last question before you all get to swarm and ask us more individual questions. Listen, I think one of the big advantages we have is that we are a company that regulators around the world see as a responsible organization. The reason they see us as responsible is not only are we compliant, not only do we have tech infrastructure now that can respond quickly to the regulatory changes, we are fully aligned from a philosophy and mission perspective with almost all the regulators out there. They all want to drive and take advantage of fintech for what it can do for their citizens in terms of driving financial health.
Interestingly, whether we're in India talking to regulators, whether we're in the U.S. talking to regulators, or whether we're in China talking to regulators, they want the same thing from PayPal because we are a good corporate citizen in terms of compliance, AML, regulatory and enterprise risk management. We also work now within the financial system. Where people have no access, we'll provide that access. Where they do have access, we're working with financial companies to create an even better economy for those nations. They are all quite excited about our ability to attack cash. Cash has a lot of leakage in it, has a lot of corruption associated with it. The more you can move to digital, most governments want that to happen.
I actually really couldn't be excited about the state of our platform capabilities, our compliance capabilities to be able to work across the world right now. We're getting quite eager reception from, as I mentioned, very disparate regulators around the world.
Great. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for coming today. We appreciate your support. I'm sure we'll see lots of you in the coming weeks at conferences, we look forward to working with you.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.