3 Things to Expect from PayPal in 2021
It's been a momentous year for PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ: PYPL). While other digital payment leaders have languished because of shelter-in-place and social distancing guidelines and an ensuing drop in travel, PayPal has done quite well due to its heavy reliance on e-commerce. As a result, shares have roughly doubled in value in 2020 with just a few weeks remaining in the year. Some of these same positive trends will carry over into 2021 and beyond, and a new push into the physical world gives PayPal a new growth lever to pull on in the years ahead.
During the third quarter of 2020, PayPal notched its highest rate of growth as a public company. Revenue increased 25% year over year, driven by 15.2 million net new active accounts in the period (for a total of 361 million) and a 36% increase in total payment volume.
While e-commerce is the driving force here, the rise is impressive given that travel still put a damper on overall results. There's plenty more upside in 2021 as the global economy makes slow progress toward normalizing. But PayPal isn't waiting around for an economic recovery. It's on the offensive and making deeper inroads into the financial system by growing beyond just digital payments to become more of a tech-based financial institution -- through a mobile app. It recently added the ability to invest in cryptocurrencies for its users, started launching merchant services to its mobile money sharing app Venmo, and made deeper integrations between its digital payments capabilities and its Honey acquisition.
Source Fool.com
