PayPal has big plans for transform from a payments company to a commerce platform that can carry out buying decisions. But first, the company is going to have to retire tech debt from acquisitions and a siloed data architecture.
Speaking on PayPal's first quarter earnings call, CEO Alex Chriss laid out the strategy, which revolves around "agentic commerce":
"PayPal is transforming from a payments company to a commerce platform. This includes expanding to be available everywhere, whether it’s online, in store or agentic. This means moving from a one-size-fits-all experience to personalized experiences that leverage the vast data at our fingertips.
Imagine what a future would look like where AI agents could bring up the right products at the right time and complete your purchase. Now any business can create agentic experiences that allow customers to pay, track shipments, manage invoices and more, all powered by PayPal and all within an AI client."
Indeed, PayPal launched a remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so developers can integrate with PayPal APIs to create experiences. PayPal reported first quarter earnings of $1.29 a share on revenue of $7.8 billion, up 1% from a year ago. PayPal ended the quarter with 436 active accounts and saw strength in its Venmo brand. PayPal maintained its earnings guidance.
The broad strategy looks like this:
To get there, PayPal has to get to one platform and it's a heavy lift.
One data pool, one customer profile
On PayPal's February investor day CTO Srini Venkatesan noted that the company has 430 million consumer and merchant accounts across 200 markets and trillions of interactions. PayPal is sitting on "a valuable data vault that is more than 500 petabytes," said Venkatesan.
He said:
"PayPal’s vast and unmatched two-sided network creates a rich tapestry of insights across millions of merchants, unlocking a holistic view of the customer well beyond a merchant’s typical view. This level of intelligence helps the merchant personalize that delights our customers with rewarding shopping experiences, creating a powerful flywheel effect."
The catch? The data is scattered in disparate systems.
"Today our data is scattered across disparate systems. This slows us down. Unifying our technology is my number one priority. I’m proud to share we have already started with four initiatives: One Platform, One Profile, One Process, all Powered by AI," said Venkatesan.
Venkatesan said PayPal's pickle was the result of multiple acquired products. Each product had its own infrastructure for speed. That speed was needed at the time, but it's slowing PayPal down in an AI-driven world. PayPal needs its units to share capabilities and provide standard customer onboarding processes, features and preferences.
"Our North Star is One Platform: a common chassis that we orchestrate behind the scenes, unseen by the consumer. Our core capabilities move up to the chassis. We can build once and use for all," said Venkatesan. "This allows us to bring best-of-breed services to market faster for every customer, no matter which product they are using."
PayPal is unifying various products on one platform throughout 2025 and into 2026. The big plan is to get to one single view of the customer.
Venkatesan explained four experiences that One Profile can enable:
- Interoperability across products seamlessly, say Venmo and PayPal.
- Opportunities for customers can be extended across products.
- Shopping experiences can be personalized.
- And customer support interactions can be resolved faster since PayPal will have more visibility to be proactive.
"We are modernizing our systems, are on a journey to be cloud native to provide our customers and merchants with the fastest experience. This will be one of our most impactful modernization efforts to date," said Venkatesan.
Cloud native to enable AI
PayPal historically took a lift and shift to the cloud, but applications must become cloud native. PayPal's Braintree unit is cloud native and has seen a 20% reduction in latency of services and 2x to 3x faster time to market. Braintree can go from concept to production in less than 30 days today vs. three to four months before.
Venkatesan said:
"As we unify our platform and modernize our infrastructure, we are also standardizing on one unified development process. Over the past six months, we have streamlined a complex development system to enable faster releases and accelerated speed to market.
Today our top applications have moved to this process. And here are the results we are seeing: 50% improvement in lead time, time from concept to delivery, 40% increase in speed of build time. This has enabled our check out app to move from weekly releases to daily, up to multiple times a day. In the next few months, all developers will be on the same process."
Venkatesan added that cloud native architecture not only enables AI in the future, but also speeds up its transformation. He said AI agents are helping developers create test use case and update legacy code.
AI is also being used for virtual assistants for employees, analyze compliance cases and ultimately enhance customer experiences.
Venkatesan said agentic AI will drive commerce.
"People are increasingly using Gen AI for shopping research. However, today there is no option to make a purchase. We have already started development on an agent within the PayPal app. Customers can prompt the agent to research what they need for a camping trip, or ask it to reorder a recent purchase. With PayPal’s profile and identity context, you can seamlessly place your order. Likewise, our strategic partners could leverage PayPal agent to augment their context and to complete the purchase."
