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PayPal beat Wall Street estimates for first-quarter earnings and stuck to its annual profit forecast even at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs have fueled economic uncertainty. “PayPal had a great start to the year and our strategy is working. This is our fifth consecutive quarter of profitable growth with progress across branded checkout, PSP, omnichannel, and Venmo. We are transforming into the leading commerce platform connecting consumers and merchants globally. Our foundation is solid and we have multiple ways to win.” Alex Chriss President and CEO said.

1Q’25 Financial Results 

• Net revenues increased 1% to $7.8 billion; 2% currency-neutral (“FXN”)

1Q’25 Operating Results 

• . Total payment volume (“TPV”) increased 3% to $417.2 billion; 4% FXN
• Payment transactions decreased 7% to 6.0 billion. Excluding payment service provider4 (“PSP”), payment transactions increased 6%.
• Payment transactions per active account (“TPA”) on a trailing 12-month basis decreased 1% to 59.4. TPA ex-PSP4 increased 4%.
• Active accounts increased 2% to 436 million. On a sequential basis, active accounts increased by 0.3%, or by 1.5 million
• 45% of US branded checkout traffic on new experience
• 50% Pay with Venmo TPV growth in 1Q
• Added ~2M first-time PayPal and Venmo debit card users in 1Q
• 40% Venmo debit card monthly active account (MAA) growth in 1Q
• Meaningfully increased TM $ growth contribution from PSP in 1Q
• Launched optimized debit routing with Wayfair and Upwork & Fraud Protection Advanced with Regal Cinemas
• Added Solana and Chainlink to PayPal and Venmo wallets & enabled rewards for PYUSD holders
• Launched first remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for agentic commerce
• Branded checkout TPV growth driven by continued strength across large enterprise platforms, marketplaces within PayPal checkout, and Pay with Venmo

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“Brendan has a long track record of strong leadership and execution against some of our most important initiatives, and he has earned the trust and respect of our stakeholders, including the Board and our colleagues,” said Van Saun. “His efforts have contributed significantly to our transformation into a top super-regional bank, and I am confident that his passion and leadership will continue to propel Citizens forward.” Over his 20 years at Citizens, Coughlin has developed and launched several of the bank’s most innovative offerings, including merchant point-of-sale financing partnerships with Apple and Microsoft, national education refinance products, and expansion of the consumer franchise into new markets. His focus on growth, driving innovation, and improving customer experience has directly contributed to the strong performance and market share gains of the consumer franchise. In 2023, Brendan was instrumental in the national launch of Citizens Private Bank, which continues to deliver strong performance, recently reaching $8.7 billion in high-quality deposits and $5.2 billion in assets under management (AUM). The bank has also made meaningful strides in broadening its Wealth Management capabilities under Coughlin’s leadership, including the addition of new advisory teams in California, Boston and Florida. Citizens also announced that current Vice Chair and Chief Financial Officer John Woods has decided to depart from Citizens to accept another opportunity. He is expected to leave in August 2025. The company will initiate a formal internal and external search and John will continue to work with the bank’s strong Finance team to ensure a smooth transition.

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Taira Hall, the head of enterprise payments strategy at Citizens Bank, told the practice of “screen scraping,” poses several risks to customers. To address these issues, Citizens built an open banking API, or application programming interface, a type of technology that allows software to “plug in” and access data from other software. The tool is designed to let customers securely access their financial data, such as balances and recent transactions, on external platforms without the need for screen scraping. The new tool relies on the concept of open banking, an idea that emerged in the early 2000s when online banking became more common. In its most basic form, open banking allows customers to share their financial data with service providers other than their bank. Citizens’ commercial customers, such as stores, restaurants, and business service providers, may use open banking data to automate expense tracking or verify income for gig workers, while other banks can use the data to assess borrower risk in real time instead of relying on credit scores. The API provides access to a wide range of financial data in one place, allowing customers to easily gather information from sources like invoices and payrolls. “Normally, commercial customers need to go through time-consuming and complicated processes involving paperwork and implementation in order to get their data from bank to external platform,” Hall said. “But with the open banking API, all that’s needed is linking their Citizens accounts from within the external platform, and the data starts to flow automatically.” Other banks, such as Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo, have also developed opening banking APIs for their commercial customers. Citizens’ API uses a data aggregator as a middle layer between the bank and the external platform. Instead of the bank connecting to each individual platform, it connects to a central data aggregator that can then transmit customer data, once the customer has given permission. Hall said the API removed the need for clients to work with anyone from Citizens to share their data. It also eliminated the security risks associated with practices such as screen scraping. The API was built largely in-house through a collaboration between Citizens’ technology, product, risk, legal, and cyber teams. Hall said the primary challenges were getting the tech to work and forming relationships with the companies that aggregate the data. Hall said the API had seen “significant” use both by consumers and business clients since it launched in March. She added that the bank had also seen a 95% reduction in screen scraping, which they measured by tracking how often financial data aggregators accessed their website.

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Capital One is on track to eliminate the use of passwords for most internal and external employee-facing applications by the end of this year. One major effect of drastically reducing the use of passwords by employees is that it will “effectively eliminate entire classes” of cyberattack against the company, according to the bank’s chief technology risk officer, Andy Ozment. Specifically, going passwordless will eliminate phishing attacks, in which attackers steal employees’ passwords and one-time login codes, and password guessing attacks. For Capital One specifically, the implementation of passwordless authentication is multi-factor authentication using a x.509 device certificate and a FIDO2 passkey. X.509 is a specific standard for these certificates. In some cases, devices unlock passkeys using a short PIN that the user must enter. Although this approach is still more secure than a password because the PIN does not leave the device, and the device keeps the passkey being unlocked private, the use of PINs has generated complaints at Capital One that the bank isn’t truly going passwordless. Passwordless helps protect Capital One against specific attack vectors by blocking attempts where an attacker obtains a password or multifactor authentication (MFA) code from a text or app. More broadly, passwordless eliminates man-in-the-middle attacks, in which an attacker poses as the bank or intercepts communications that are meant to be secure. Passwordless eliminates these threats through asymmetric encryption, which ensures that the only way to decrypt a message is with a private encryption key, which devices manage automatically and much more carefully than users can manage passwords. As a concrete example, “probably the largest single reduction in risk we’ll get from this initiative” out of Capital One’s passwordless journey, according to Ozment, was transitioning the company’s virtual private network (VPN) to passwordless. With passwordless VPN, Capital One employees connect to the bank’s network to begin their work not by entering a username and password but using their preferred passwordless authentication. For many employees, this means using a device biometric — for example, facial recognition on their iPhone or the fingerprint scanner on their computer. Employees who prefer other methods can plug in their USB security key or tap their NFC device to their phone. While the passwordless journey is expected to end this year for Capital One, there are more gains the company can make in simultaneously simplifying and securing the employee experience. Indeed, it could lead to eliminating the use of a VPN.

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J.P. Morgan is working on an in-vehicle wallet system with Qualcomm, where they’re doing everything from the in-car, from hardware to the display piece, JP Morgan payments, orchestrating the payments end to end financials with it and it works as one integrated platform. Running end to end has the JP Morgan payments piece, the dash that’s actually there with third party merchants, a complete end to end user experience as a partnership.  Rob Abrams, CEO of J.P. Morgan Mobility Payments Solutions says, ” So on the dash, which is then branded by whatever automaker you’re driving, you have the same thing you have today, like the mapping application where you not only can do that, but you have a quick service restaurant that’s also one of the apps on that experience where you can then order your burger and fries or your milkshake, whatever your preference is to order ahead and do the full payment checkout so that when you arrive it’s all paid for, just take the order and go just one example.  One of the things that the car has now that the technology is further along today than it was still coming along is it actually knows how long it’s taking because the MAP app says it’s going to take 22 minutes between here and there. It knows based on traffic, here’s when you’re going to arrive approximately. So it can actually put the order in, send it with here’s when penny is going to arrive. The restaurant then can get it ready so that it’s not sitting cold, but it’s also you’re not waiting for it for 15 minutes, the phone out. You’re sort of timing it of when do I actually click the button for order to hope that you get the equation right. Paying for parking would be a good use case for this technology. But through a network of partnerships with various parking providers, some aggregators should be able to just say, go from here to there and reserve the parking, pay for the parking or at least pay for the parking as you drive into the lot or the street parking instead of then having to take your phone out, put in which actual site you’re in and then pay it actually did it all in one step. Certainly everybody’s used to the tolling pieces, going through tolls, not paying, not taking out your credit card to go pay for tolls even in some other places. Having it driven because the car then becomes the credit card in that use case. And then you have some other things like car washes where you drive up instead of having to take out the money or the credit card that it opens up the wash bay and it already knows.  So the vehicle is certainly dependent on the vehicle technology for things like strong authentication, so having the fingerprint reader in there, the face recognition is the next and it makes it easier, which also will drive customer adoption.  Instead of having to enter in a pin to verify that it’s actually you making a purchase or anything else the same way you would do on your phone, the car needs that same facial recognition or fingerprint authentication in order to make it seamless.  I think a lot of it is actually going to be curated to where the vehicle is and provide extra signals that eventually, maybe not in the beginning will actually help reduce the fraud as well. So it knows your vehicle, it knows your driving patterns, it knows where you go, potentially the kinds of purchases. There is some good ability to harness that to reduce, but in the beginning it’ll be about the same. We’ve used credit card as the example for payments here. Pay by bank, larger and larger portion of the payment ecosystem over in Europe it would be directed, but in the US straight pushed by the banks and then can you actually then do this with real-time settlement between the merchants, the automotive manufacturers, et cetera. Eventually it will come more into the states and it’s starting to, they’re all looking at how do I commoditize not only the in-car transaction for while I’m driving, but also the in-car experience for things like subscriptions coming to the vehicle. Because in a very tight margin, business subscriptions are certainly one of the next avenues that they’re going to. So in order to do that, you also need this same ecosystem that allows for driving up to the pump.

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Square announced new Square Banking tools that give sellers instant access to their cash flow and free, easier ways to manage their earnings. Business owners can conveniently sign up for a Square payments account and a free Square Checking¹ account in just minutes through one streamlined application—right on Square’s website and point of sale app. In addition, Square Savings accounts now feature new personalized savings recommendations, informed by cash flow data and industry insights, to make it easy for sellers to organize their funds into folders for key expenses like taxes and supplies. Business owners can now open a square checking account when they sign up for square payments to get instant, 24/7 access to sales revenue. Sellers using Square’s free business savings account will also get personalized savings recommendations to help them easily allocate funds into folders dedicated to their top expenses and investment goals. This new feature uses a seller’s own cash flow data and industry-specific insights derived from the savings patterns of similar sellers within Square’s ecosystem to make these recommendations. And with Square Savings, there are no monthly fees, service or transfer fees, or minimum balance requirements to worry about. In, addition, sellers enjoy: Competitive 1.00% APY to maximize their money, earning more than 2x the national average on funds set aside; Round-the-clock access to their account, with free instant transfers to the Square Checking for immediate use; and FDIC insurance up to $2.5M. With solutions for banking, payroll, invoicing, and inventory management all working seamlessly together within the Square ecosystem and integrated directly into the flow of payments, sellers can stay on top of their finances and get a clear, real-time view of their business activity through a unified dashboard. With Square Banking, sellers save an average of 44 hours a month by not waiting for traditional bank transfers to settle. And the average customer satisfaction (CSAT) score for Square Banking is 86 percent, more than 20 percent higher than the average CSAT scores of the most popular primary banking institutions in the U.S.

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