Following a third-quarter earnings and revenue beat as well as a strong quarter for Venmo, shares of PayPal jumped 9 percent on Friday (Oct. 19). The stock reached highs over $86, CNBC reported.
The total payment volumes of Venmo skyrocketed by 78 percent and reached $17 billion. And nearly a quarter – or 24 percent of Venmo users – completed a “monetizable action.” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said on a call with analysts that the growth is encouraging: “Our monetization efforts appear to be reaching a tipping point,” he said.
On Friday (Oct. 19), BTIG set a price target of $95 and upgraded the stock from neutral to buy. It told clients that the company’s “monetization process brought the company ‘off the sidelines.'” BTIG Analyst Mark Palmer wrote in a note that monetizing Venmo is “an important initiative with regard to the stock’s valuation inasmuch as many investors’ future estimates are predicted on the success of that monetization effort.”
PayPal posted results on Thursday (Oct. 18) after the markets closed that showed double-digit growth in overall transaction volume and payments volume, and high single-digit boosts in the number of payments per active account. In terms of the stats that Wall Street watches, the company earned $.58, beating projections by $.04. Revenues were up 14 percent to $3.7 billion, which was better than the Street predicted by around $20 million.
The company quickened its pace of active accounts added at 9.1 million in the latest quarter, better than the same metric of 8.2 million accounts added in the year-ago period. The company ended the latest period with 254 million active accounts, which represents 15 percent growth year on year.
Total payment transactions stood at 2.5 billion, which marked a 27 percent gain, and were nearly paced by $143 billion logged in total payments volume, which were up 25 percent on an FX neutral basis. Transactions per active account, said the company, were up 9.5 percent on a trailing 12-month basis to 36.5 payments per account.
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