Name: This Is Venmo's Secret Sauce
Uploaded: 2016-07-13
Duration: 4 min 48 s
Description: PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman explains.

[ MUSIC ] Let's talk a little bit about mobile. There are two kinds of trends that are happening right now, and I'm fascinated with them. One is the person to person payments, the rise of those. We were talking about Access earlier, I've never seen so many people jump on, And use something like Venmo. People who aren't very technologically, you know they're not the first people to download the new app. They probably don; t have, well, maybe they have Pokemon Go, but you get the idea. And then on the other side you've got this rise of messaging, you know, payments through messaging platforms and things like that. Let's start with Venmo. How are you thinking about that because one of the things that. That many people don't know is that those platforms aren't monetized now, is that right? Yep. So I think a lot of large companies, the way they kill a lot of things, is they think about each one of their products with exactly the same measurements. So, there are certain Products within their lifecycle that should have certain measurements where you are making them more efficient, more profitable, you're making sure you're solving any customer complaints around them. But you are measuring them, basically, in terms of profitability and maybe revenue, revenue growth. Classic public companies. Right. Then there are other products that you have in your portfolio that are just taking off. And the way you want to measure them is are you gaining scale? Are you gaining scale? Venmo is a perfect example of that. Venmo is our service for, really people under 30. There is a kind of a Venmo line. And, the secret sauce of Venmo was turning a transaction into an experience. Where every transaction you do, you share that in your social feeds that you have, and so. Although you don't have to. You don't have to. You can turn it off, but most do. And people check their app four or five times A week it was the number three most popular app last year in the country. And it's almost ubiquitous in the millennial and gen X segments of the market. And that's growing extraordinarily fast right now. With 10 billion plus of volume on it, and now we're looking at how to we start to monetize that? Yeah. And so we'll allow a Venmo user to not just split the bill with friends or pay rent to somebody, because Venmo is sort of a verb right now for them, but we'll add them to pay using their Venmo account at merchants that have PayPal accounts. And every time they do that, then we'll take our fee from the merchant to go and do that. And so we wanna make sure that we are very wise and thoughtful about how we monetize Venmo. We will, it's a great asset for us. But we wanna make sure that we're not putting the wrong metrics on it. That sub- optimized, the medium to long term potential for that service. Do you worry about, kind of, brain confusion and conflict? So, just the other day I sent some money using paper to my brother. And the other day I sent some money to a friend using Venmo. And I had different decisions around that. One was a larger amount of money and I decided I'll use PayPal. For some reason I thought it was, I don't know. How are you thinking about that? Do people even identify the two? When I talk to people they don't realize that Finmail and PayPal are the same company. I give a speech at NYU to their incoming student body and. Yeah, I thought it was a pretty inspiring speech and [ LAUGH ] one of the students got up, went up to the microphone and said, that was great, blah blah blah, but I hate to tell you, all of us use Venmo. And I mean. Yeah because he didn't realize that Venmo was a part of the PayPal, and I was like okay, I'll take it. And so I don't think there's much confusion. In fact I think a multi- brand approach is fine. Think about Facebook. They have Instagram They have their photo sources. But it doesn't matter if you use Facebook photos or Instagram. They've got Messenger, they've got WhatsApp. And our view of this is we wanna be very thoughtful about a multibrand strategy. But multibrands don't intimidate us at all, as long as they're focused. At a particular segment or a particular need then multi brand is fine. [ MUSIC ]