PayPal - Q2 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. My name is Sarah. I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to PayPal Holdings Earnings Conference Call for the Q2 2023. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Ms. Gabrielle Rabinovitch, Senior Vice President and Acting CFO. Please go ahead.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, thank you for joining us. Welcome to PayPal's Earnings Conference Call for the Q2 of 2023. Joining me today on the call is Dan Schulman, our President and CEO. We're providing a slide presentation to accompany our commentary. This conference call is also being webcast, both the presentation and call are available on our investor relations website. In discussing our company's performance, we will refer to some non-GAAP measures. You can find the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the presentation accompanying this conference call. We will make forward-looking statements that are based on our current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions, involve risks and uncertainties.

These statements include, without limitation, our guidance for the Q3 and full year 2023, our planning assumptions for 2023, our comments related to anticipated foreign exchange rates, operating margin, impact from our sale of loans to KKR, and share repurchase activity. Our actual results may differ materially from these statements. You can find more information about risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could affect our results in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC and available on our investor relations website. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. All information in this presentation is as of today's date, August 2, 2023. We expressly disclaim any obligation to update this information. With that, let me turn the call over to Dan.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Thanks, Gabs, thanks everyone for joining us on today's call. I'm proud of the PayPal team as we delivered another solid quarter. Revenues came in above the top end of our guidance, and non-GAAP EPS grew 24% to $1.16, in line with the midpoint of our guide. We are reiterating our guidance for non-GAAP EPS and operating margin expansion for the full year. Encouragingly, e-commerce growth appears to have stabilized in the mid-single digits, substantially above our estimates when we entered 2023. Our branded checkout volumes grew roughly in line with the industry in Q2 and accelerated to nearly 6.5% growth in the month of June. In July, our branded checkout volume growth accelerated again to over 8%, our highest monthly growth rate since the end of the pandemic.

We expect branded checkout volumes will strengthen throughout the back half of the year, supported by traction from our key strategic initiatives. Of course, we still face a fluid global macroeconomic environment. However, it is quite encouraging to see core inflation rates continue to come down. As inflation cools, we would expect to see discretionary spending rise, which we believe will support and possibly accelerate the overall growth of e-commerce spending. As a market leader in digital payments, any uptick in e-commerce will accelerate our growth. Revenues in Q2 grew by 8% on a currency neutral basis to approximately $7.3 billion. It's instructive to note that we are lapping certain items that provided an outsized benefit to us in Q2 and Q3 last year.

Consequently, those items pressure our revenue growth rate by approximately 1.25% in each of those quarters this year. Excluding these items, our growth in Q2 would have been between 9%-10%. As we mentioned last quarter, we expect our revenue growth in the second half of the year to be roughly the same as, and given recent trends, maybe a bit better than the first half. We expect Q3 revenues to grow approximately 8% on a currency neutral basis. I would highlight that July was a very strong start to the quarter, with currency neutral revenue growth of 9% and TPV growth accelerating into the low teens. For the year, we anticipate our revenue growth to be between 9%-10% on a currency neutral basis. We continue to exercise good discipline in managing operating expenses.

For the quarter, non-GAAP, non-transaction-related expenses fell 11% year-over-year. As a result, our non-GAAP operating margin was 21.4%. up approximately 230 basis points from a year ago. We expect to increase our non-GAAP operating margin for the full year by at least 100 basis points. As we look ahead to the rest of 2023 and into 2024, we expect to drive meaningful productivity improvements. Our initial experiences with AI and continuing advances in our processes, infrastructure, and product quality enable us to see a future where we do things better, faster, and cheaper. These overall cost savings come even as we significantly invest against our three strategic priorities.

We know exactly what we need to do as we look towards 2024, and as you can see in our results, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labor. We understand that over the medium to long term, we need to deliver growth in our transaction margin dollars to ensure we sustainably grow our earnings. We are beginning to see clear signs that our initiatives will yield notable traction against that objective over the next several quarters. As I mentioned, we expect our top line to accelerate to low double-digit growth by Q4. We expect transaction margin dollars to increase, while our operating expenses continue to create significant leverage. That, in connection with our share buybacks, enables us to target low to mid-teens EPS growth for the remainder of 2023, even as we begin to lap the increases we enjoyed on our interest income.

I'd like to now turn to our three strategic priorities in which we are investing our resources and energy: Branded checkout, our PSP merchant solutions, and our digital wallets. As I've mentioned in the past, all three of these are critical and interrelated. They are essential for us to increase our share of the e-commerce market, as well as accelerate our margin dollar growth. As we discussed in our June investor meeting, we are meaningfully accelerating new product innovations into the market, scaling our AB testing, and significantly improving our time to market. We are now consistently delivering against our roadmap on schedule. This is the result of significant investments in our platform infrastructure and tools, an enhanced set of measurements and performance indicators, hiring new talent, and early successes using AI in our software development process.

We continue to ramp our test velocity with more than 300 experiments launched across our product experiences in the first half of the year. Every successful test leads to incremental customer benefits, and the cumulative effect of those changes leads to noticeable improvements in our key metrics, including the gains we are seeing in branded checkout growth. For instance, our buy now, pay later traction has meaningfully accelerated with the introduction of pre-approved amounts to our consumers. Our work in onboarding and onboarding new experiences has driven new monthly cohorts with higher engagement and lifetime value. This month, we are expanding the rollout of Passkeys in the US and Europe, which will greatly simplify the branded checkout login experience and drive improved authorization rates that will further extend our lead over our competitors.

Our goal is to continually close the gap in our login and checkout experiences every quarter, and to be equal to or better than any competitor within the next year. We simultaneously aim to drive differentiated wallet experiences across both PayPal and Venmo. We believe that only those companies with unique and scaled datasets will be able to fully utilize the power of AI to drive actionable insights and differentiated value propositions for their customers. We are already experimenting internally with an AI-driven PayPal Assistant. We envision that a version of this will be part of our consumer app, and we plan to introduce it later this year. We continue to see impressive traction in our PSP business, with our growth rates nearly 30% on a currency-neutral basis.

Many of the largest tech companies in the world are now either using our Braintree capabilities or are in deep strategic negotiations with us to do so. We are in the process of rolling out high-margin, value-added services, expanding internationally, and making noticeable progress with in-person payments. We continue to receive exceptional interest in our next generation checkout solution, which will leverage the scale of our network vault, our deep understanding of our two-sided network, and the development of proprietary AI models. I couldn't be more pleased with the initial rollout of PayPal Complete Payments, our PSP merchant solution for channel partners in the SMB market. We are seeing tremendous interest in the platform, with a substantial pipeline of completed sales and a backlog of deals that continues to grow. Importantly, our major channel partners are enthusiastic about its capabilities.

We have already implemented PPCP with leading channel partners like Adobe, Lightspeed, Recurly, Shift4, Shopify, Stax Payments, UltraCart, Wix, and WooCommerce, with more than 25 additional channel partners scheduled to be live by the end of the year. This not only demonstrates the strength of our platform capabilities, but will also enable a meaningful number of SMB merchants to access our latest checkout experiences. There is a remarkable sense of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm among our leadership teams as we see clear and distinct signs of reinvigorated success in the market. We are now able to take advantage of many of the investments we have made over the past years to deliver a best-in-class experience for our customers, leveraging a modern infrastructure and our scale in the age of AI.

We have successfully recruited a large number of external talent to complement our internal teams in both AI and machine learning, as well as throughout our product, engineering, and technology groups, in order to build upon our success and maximize our opportunity. I'd like to end my remarks talking about our CEO succession plan. We are in the very final stages of the process, with several outstanding candidates, all of whom are highly qualified and excited to lead PayPal as we go into our next chapter of growth. I'm eager to welcome PayPal's next CEO, to work with them on a seamless onboarding, and to support them and the amazing PayPal team as I transition to my role on the board. As you can hopefully tell, we have a lot of energy and confidence that we are on the right path with good momentum.

Many of the headwinds we faced are now turning into tailwinds. We are executing with a high degree of excellence. We have a firm handle on our business model and can point to numerous successes already making a real difference in the market, which will only continue to compound over time. PayPal is in an increasingly strong position, and we are poised to deliver for our customers and our shareholders. Thank you. With that, let me turn the call over to Gab.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

Thanks, Dan. I'd like to start by thanking the entire PayPal team for their continued commitment to serving our customers and executing our priorities. PayPal delivered another solid quarter in a dynamic environment. We're reporting revenue at the high end of our guidance range and earnings per share consistent with our expectations. Our results are tracking with the guidance we gave for the full year and reflect steady progress against our long-term growth aspirations. We continue to invest in our key initiatives while demonstrating discipline in delivering on our operating expense commitments. In June, we were delighted to share more about our long-term strategic plan and product roadmap at our investment community meeting. Importantly, the product launches we discussed are on track, and we continue to gain conviction in our ability to accelerate our branded checkout volumes and drive greater profitability across our PSP services.

During the quarter, we were pleased to announce a multi-year agreement to sell both our existing European buy now, pay later receivables, as well as future originations to KKR. During my remarks, I will discuss the impact of this externalization on our financial results. We have also included additional details in our investor update presentation. Before discussing our outlook for the remainder of the year, I'd like to highlight our Q2 performance. As Dan mentioned, revenue increased 8% on a currency-neutral basis and 7% at spot to $7.3 billion. Transaction revenue grew 5% to $6.6 billion, driven primarily by Braintree and PayPal branded checkout. Headwinds to growth in the quarter included the lapping of $75 million in contractual compensation from merchants last year, which was de minimis this year.

$72 million less in hedge gains relative to Q2 last year, and the impact from migrating and consolidating legacy PayPal payment services. Other value-added services revenue grew 37% to $731 million. This performance was predominantly due to increased interest income on customer stored balances and, to a lesser extent, revenue growth from consumer credit products. In the Q2, US revenue grew 9% and international revenue increased 5%. On a currency-neutral basis, international revenue increased 7%, accelerating sequentially and year-over-year. Transaction take rate declined 11 basis points to 1.74%.

Approximately two-thirds of this decline was driven by a decline in foreign exchange fees, in part driven by lower currency volatility, a decline in gains from foreign currency hedges, which are recorded as international transaction revenue, and the headwind from lapping elevated contractual assessments from merchants last year. While merchant mix continued to pressure our branded checkout take rate, the Q2 was an improvement from Q1. Our total take rate declined 6 basis points to 1.94%, affected by the same factors as transaction take rate. Transaction expense as a rate of TPV came in at 94 basis points, 4 basis points higher than Q2 last year. This increase was primarily driven by growth in Braintree volumes, partially offset by rate benefits in core PayPal and Venmo. Overall, transaction expense dollars grew 16%.

Transaction loss as a rate of TPV was 8 basis points for the quarter, a 3.6 basis point improvement versus last year. Transaction loss dollars declined 25%. The decrease this year was primarily due to an atypical merchant insolvency last year, which drove a sizable loss in the Q2, with no comparable exposure this year. Our ongoing risk mitigation activities and mix of volumes also contributed to this performance. Credit losses were $112 million, or 3 basis points as a rate of TPV. On a dollar basis, credit losses increased 65%. Provisions in the quarter were driven by a build of $146 million, partially offset by a $33 million reserve release from the reclassification of our European buy now, pay later portfolio to held for sale from held for investment.

The operating income benefit from this release of reserves was entirely offset by the fair value discount on the portfolio classified as held for sale. The increased provisioning resulted from increased expected losses in our PayPal Business Loans portfolio, as well as growth in our US pay later portfolio. Like the broader industry, we're seeing a normalization of our credit portfolio to pre-COVID delinquency levels across our consumer and PayPal Working Capital portfolios. That said, we have seen some deterioration in our business loans portfolio. This portfolio represents less than 15% of our overall net credit receivables, and as we discussed last quarter, we have taken remedial actions to address this performance. We've tightened originations and have already seen improvement in new cohorts. We'll be managing the book with similar rigor as we move through the remainder of the year.

As a result of designating $1.9 billion in pay later receivables to assets held for sale, we ended Q2 with $5.5 billion in net credit receivables, a 3.5% decline year-over-year, and a 26% decline sequentially. The decline in receivables due to held for sale accounting also contributed to an increase in our reserve coverage ratio. This ratio increased to 10% from 7.8% in Q1. In the aggregate, volume-based expenses increased 13% in Q2, relative to an increase of 30% in the Q2 of 2022. Transaction margin dollars grew 1% to $3.3 billion, and transaction margin was 45.9%.

While our transaction margin declined in the quarter, the rate of decline slowed considerably from both Q1 and the 2Q of last year, and we're executing on our strategy to grow transaction margin $. We're encouraged by the progress we're making against our longer-term initiatives that will support improved transaction margin performance over time. Q2 marked the 3Q in a row that we've delivered meaningful expansion in our operating margin on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. Ongoing discipline in managing our cost structure allowed us to more than offset transaction margin compression with operating expense leverage. On a non-GAAP basis, non-transaction related operating expenses declined 11%, with reductions across each of our principal operating expense categories contributing significant leverage. Strong expense performance resulted in 20% growth in non-GAAP operating income to $1.6 billion.

This is the highest growth in operating income that we've delivered in more than two years. Non-GAAP operating margin expanded 228 basis points to 21.4%, which was slightly below the guidance we gave for the quarter. This is principally attributable to our credit portfolio, where we earn less revenue than expected and increased loss provisions. For the Q2, non-GAAP EPS increased 24% to $1.16, which was the midpoint of our guidance range. We ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and investments of $14.4 billion. The net cash outflows for originations of loans held for sale reduced cash flows from operations by $1.2 billion in the quarter, resulting in free cash flow for the quarter of negative $350 million.

Later this year, when the sale of the European BNPL back book closes, the proceeds will be recognized in cash flows from operations and offset this decline. While the timing of accounting treatment will affect the quarterly profile of our free cash flow, there is no change to our outlook for the year, and we continue to expect to generate approximately $5 billion in free cash flow. In the quarter, we completed $1.5 billion in share repurchases. For the full year, we now expect to allocate approximately $5 billion to our buyback program. Our recently announced credit externalization will help optimize our balance sheet and improve our capital efficiency. Given our desire to return capital to shareholders and the confidence we have in our business, we've taken a more aggressive approach to share repurchases.

Since the end of 2021, our diluted share count has declined 6%. I would now like to discuss our outlook for the remainder of 2023. As Dan shared, based on our results for the first half of the year, we're reaffirming our guidance for the year for non-GAAP operating margin expansion and earnings per share. In the aggregate, for the first and Q2 of 2023, we've delivered revenue growth of approximately 9% on a currency-neutral basis. We expect revenue growth in the back half of the year to be in line with this performance, if not slightly ahead, given the momentum we're seeing in the business. In addition, we're on track to meet our expense guidance for the year, and are committed to delivering at least 100 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin improvement.

We also continue to expect to deliver non-GAAP earnings per share of approximately $4.95, representing 20% growth from 2022. We're reiterating our full year guidance while absorbing incremental pressure from our credit portfolio, given strengthening business performance, driven by checkout initiatives and our ongoing realization of productivity gains. For the Q3, we expect revenue to grow approximately 8% on both a spot and currency-neutral basis to approximately $7.4 billion at current spot rates. In addition, we expect non-GAAP earnings per share to be in the range of $1.22-$1.24, representing growth of approximately 13.5% at the midpoint of the range. In summary, we're proud of our solid operating results this quarter. PayPal's unique competitive advantages, including our portfolio of differentiated assets and our global scale and ubiquity, continue to drive us forward.

We're committed to investing in our core strengths and building PayPal for the future, and we're guided by our relentless focus on creating the best possible experiences for our customers. Our revenue momentum and customer engagement trends position us well to achieve our growth objectives this year and beyond. Given the uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment, we remain focused on managing the things we can control and allocating capital with discipline to ensure we optimize for long-term value creation and resiliency. With that, Dan and I are happy to take your questions. Sarah, please go ahead.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press Star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. We ask that you limit yourself to one question, then return to the queue if you have a follow-up. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Tien-Tsin Huang of JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Tien-Tsin Huang (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, thanks, thanks a lot. I want to ask a question on e-commerce health. Dan, I know you talked about it upfront. We're just getting a lot of questions on, on the e-commerce industry in general. You mentioned inflation easing should help. I'm, I'm curious about other trends, like shift from services to goods, like our economists are talking about, which I think would also be a, a tailwind for you versus a headwind previously. Is this something you're seeing, or maybe is that changing how you're thinking about the second half versus a quarter ago? It seems like there's some room for upsetting your outlook here, given the exit growth rate and what you talked about for July. Thanks.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yeah. Thanks, Tien-Tsin. It's great to, great to hear your voice, and thanks for the question. Look, I think the story of the quarter is really the sort of the shape of the results inside the quarter and then the strong exit as we went into July and seeing July results. You know, in our view right now, we are beginning to see an inflection point. We're seeing our results on a slightly different trajectory, for sure. As I mentioned in my remarks, we're clearly seeing a lot of headwinds begin to shift towards tailwinds. E-commerce is definitely one of those. We see e-commerce growth accelerating. We think it is at least in the mid-single digits right now. That's substantially above what we thought when we entered the year, where we thought it might be, might be flat year-over-year.

I would say I've got a slight bias that that will continue to accelerate. You've got a range out there from, you know, low of 0 to high of 10%. We think it's probably right in the middle of that, and we think it is being driven by a shift from travel and services into goods, into fashion, more coming into retail, pieces of that. Clearly, as inflation cools, we would expect to see more discretionary spend rebound, and that will help drive e-commerce. One of the, you know, headwinds we faced was e-commerce growth slowing. Now it's accelerating again, and that clearly will be meaningful for us. We're also seeing improvements, as Gab has mentioned, in cross-border. That's beginning to accelerate again.

That's obviously a very meaningful thing for us because, one, our value proposition is perfect for cross-border. It's consumers buying from merchants that they don't really know, but they trust PayPal to make sure that, that payment will be protected for them. It's obviously extremely high margin business for us, and that seems to be accelerating nicely right now. PPCP, which was, you know, a really important introduction for us for numerous reasons, could not have had a better reception in the market. We've got tremendous momentum there. Braintree continues to go from strength to strength, and we're seeing a lot of our value-added services now start to take hold. I can talk about some of that later in the call, if somebody wants to ask about that. Obviously, branded branded checkout is accelerating.

That 8%. You know, it's the highest we've seen since the end of the pandemic. We continue to expect to see that strengthen as we go through the year, as many of our initiatives are really taking hold. In the last quarter, we've had another 200+ experiments that are going to happen in Q3. That's, that's all adding to momentum. I guess at the end of the day, what that's adding up to, when we look at our NPS, we're now at a seven-year high in that. There's clearly a lot of momentum in the business right now, and we just want to double down on that.

We, we do obviously feel a lot better today than we did 90 days ago, but I think that's just going to continue when you ask that same question a quarter from now.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Darrin Peller (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, thanks, guys. You know, revenue growth was, was obviously sound, but we still saw transaction profit dollars, a little less pronounced versus revenue. I think it actually may have decreased a bit year-over-year. So, you know, Gabrielle, I know you talked about some one-time growers and hedging differences, and I'm sure the mix between branded, unbranded continues to have an impact, given the growth of Braintree. If you could just help us understand the moving parts in the quarter and the trends into second half as far as gross profit or transaction profit growth goes, that'd be great. Thanks.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

You bet. You bet, Darren. You know, for the quarter, transaction margin dollars grew 1%, which is essentially in line with Q1. That said, when we look at the underlying performance of our business, we're very encouraged by the stronger results we're seeing. In my prepared remarks, I called out several items that created headwinds to growth in the quarter due to lapping. In addition, we actually had some benefits that we saw in the quarter as well from the release of reserves, from held for sale reclassification, as well as from lapping that large merchant exposure last year. When we adjust for all these items, both the benefits and the drags, on a more normalized basis, we actually see transaction margin dollars in the quarter growing several points faster than the reported 1%.

What we're really encouraged by is the strengthening profile of the business. We're actually starting to see the benefits of our initiatives. As we get through some of the noise from lapping, we do expect to see improving transaction profit growth. When we think about the back half, in Q3, we'll still see some pressure on transaction margin performance. In Q4, we expect to see an improvement. Over the longer term, our TM profile in the future will certainly be benefited by the acceleration in branded checkout, by e-commerce acceleration, by the improved cross-border trends that Dan referred to, as well as from the value-added services that we're adding on the PSP side.

Darrin Peller (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

That's, that's really helpful. It sounds like some of these initiatives are third, Q4 events, but they could move the needle starting then?

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

We expect to exit the year in a much stronger position from a TM trajectory, than where we are right now.

Darrin Peller (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, very good. Thanks, guys.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

You bet.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

James Faucette (Managing Director, Head of U.S. IT Services and Fintech Research and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you very much. I wanted to follow up on, on Darren's question. I know that, you know, unbranded seems to be a drag or dilutive to margins right now overall, which is a little bit surprising given just kind of how margin structure tends to be throughout the industry. I know you've talked a little bit in the past about adding incremental services to unbranded that could improve that, that structural margin component in unbranded. Can you talk a little bit about what that may look like, timing, and if any of those initiatives are, will play a role in improving the transaction margin that you're looking at for the latter part of this year? Thanks.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yeah. I, I'll take a crack at that, James. Thanks for the question. You know, our PSP business does continue to go from strength to strength. As we talked about, our overall TPV was nearly 30% in the quarter, that's despite, as Gabrielle mentioned, deprecating some of our older PSP flows, you know, things coming off of our PayPal Pro. We actually migrated about $5 billion of TPV from our legacy stacks onto PPCP in this past quarter. You know, it's a bit of a drag in the quarter, but we're going to be done with that by the end of the year. We continue to win marquee accounts in the business, you know, whether that be Booking.com, Meta, Allstate Insurance.

You know, these are big accounts that we are winning, because winning PSP is a strategic imperative for us. It allows us to have our latest checkout experiences with the largest, most important merchants in the world across PayPal, Venmo, and buy now, pay later. We capture 100% of the data flows, which really is feeding our AI engines. It's fueling what will be our next generation checkout. Most importantly, it's fueling kind of our ability to have best-in-class auth rates in the industry and the lowest loss rates in the industry. In terms of the higher margin services that we're gonna be putting out there, you know, we are seeing a lot of traction on that right now. For instance. We are moving into in-store. That's always been an area of opportunity for us.

We are now fully implemented with 20 marquee merchants in over 1,000 in-store locations, over 2,500 POS systems. We'll continue to do quite well there and push significantly in that. We're making good progress in selling things like payouts, risk-as-a-service, disputes, automation. We're seeing our largest customers begin to adopt that right now, whether it be SHEIN or Meta or TikTok. Really, these are some of the bigger clients that we have adopting our value-added services. I'll just give you 1 example. We just started doing orchestration in 6 additional LatAm countries with much higher margins. Where we're doing that orchestration for our largest customers, we're seeing, like, 190 basis point auth rate improvement. You're seeing kind of this win-win as, as we're doing this.

Of course, PPCP, as it goes down market, is a much higher margin product for us. I talked about all of the channel partners that have already implemented that or in the middle of implementing. We've got another 25 more partners by year-end in the US, another 15 EU partners by year-end. We're seeing a tremendous amount of scaling on that. We've also enabled, here in the US, 1.2 million SMB merchants to basically do a one-click migration into PPCP. We've already done all the risk assessment for them. They're on the right platforms for us to be able to seamlessly transition them onto that platform. I think we're gonna see a large amount of volume moving into PPCP. That's obviously higher margin.

Value-added services on Braintree will also help, and those will develop over time. Clearly, every quarter, they will add, and the sum cumulative total will start to feel as we kind of exit the year and certainly as we go into 2024 with that. I hope that helped. Great. James, a little bit. No, that's great. Thanks. Yeah.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays. Your line is open.

Ramsey El-Assal (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, thanks for taking my question this evening. In terms of operating margin performance, were there any factors besides credit that had a bigger impact than you expected in Q2? Then separately, can you just talk about the overall health of the credit business? Give us more color on the steps you're taking to maybe manage it a little bit differently. It sounded like that was the plan.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

Absolutely. For the quarter, we expanded our operating margin by about 228 basis points to 21.4%. This was a slight miss to our guidance of approximately 22%, and it was predominantly driven by increased pressure from PayPal Business Loans. There's no other item that really contributed to that miss. Overall, PayPal Business Loans was about a 90 basis point drag to transaction margin and to operating margin, and this is approximately 2 times what we expected at the beginning of the quarter. It really was a real impact. As it relates to our broader credit business, we're in a really good position. Like the rest of the industry, we're seeing some reversion back to pre-COVID levels of performance.

Across our diversified portfolio of consumer and merchant credit, we're seeing relatively stable delinquency and charge-off trends. The largest growth area for us continues to be our buy now, pay later solutions, where our performance continues to be very strong. Of course, going forward, given our partnership with KKR, the majority of the originations are gonna be funded off balance sheet for us, and we'll be able to support the sustained growth of that business. On the PayPal Business Loans side, this is really the part of our portfolio where we have seen deterioration. This portfolio represents less than 15% of our overall net receivables. We've historically seen consistently strong performance in this book, and last year, we widened the credit box, and the performance has not been within our expected risk appetite. We've taken steps to improve performance.

We significantly tightened originations. Today, the book is down about 30% in total receivables, and we expect this pressure to continue through the back half of the year, but then really to abate as we move into next year. You know, that said, the overall strength of our business and the momentum we're seeing is allowing us to maintain our operating margin and EPS guidance for the year, while we're absorbing this credit pressure.

Ramsey El-Assal (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks so much. Very helpful. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Jason Kupferberg (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks, guys. I wanted to come back to branded TPV growth. You had 6.5% in the month of June. You were over 8% in July. You're expecting further acceleration during the balance of the year. Can you just talk more specifically about the drivers of and the visibility on that ongoing improvement? Like, how much of it is better macro, how much is traction with PayPal's own branded checkout initiatives, and, you know, which among those branded checkout initiatives is moving the needle most materially here in 2023? Thanks.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yeah. I'll take a crack at that, Jason. Thanks for the question. It's an important one. We are really pleased, obviously, to see branded checkout accelerate like it is. And we have.

good confidence, that the initiatives that we're putting into place are going to continue to drive that growth. You know, as I think about what is driving that growth, you know, it's hard to delineate exactly what is happening because of macro in terms of e-commerce improving in general, as I mentioned it, to Tien-Tsin's first question, around e-commerce and what is due to our initiatives. We are clearly putting a lot of time, effort, and resource into improving the checkout experience. My hats off to that entire checkout team for all that they've done here. I'd say, look, first of all, you know, as e-commerce is growing, we're going to grow with it because we are clearly one of the market leaders, if not the market leader in digital payments around that.

You know, we do have a scale advantage over anybody in terms of, you know, 30 million plus merchants that we have out there, 80% of the top 1,500 Internet retailers. We have a performance advantage in checkout, you know, we're up to 600 basis points better in auth rates than the industry average. We have a trust advantage. You know, when small businesses put PayPal on their site, they see their online sales go up by almost 44%. Those are things that we are building upon. As you know, we mentioned in our Investor Day on June 8th, you know, the amount of acceleration and the amount of innovation we're putting into the market has improved dramatically. We did 100 A/B tests in the Q1.

We did 200 A/B tests, an incremental 200 in the 2Q. We're going to do another 200 coming here in the 3Q. In general, about 30% or so of those A/B tests that we run actually create positive benefit coming out of them. What that means is we're going to have, like, 150 or so improvements in checkout in our digital wallets running through our metrics as we go through, and some of those are 1 or 2 basis points different. Some of those can increase TPA by 10 or 15 basis points. When you put all of those together, it's extraordinarily powerful, and we are definitely seeing that in our results. We also are beginning to see a lot of our merchants move to our latest integrations.

We know that when we're native, in-app on the mobile, that we hold or gain share. You know, we talked like a quarter or two ago, about 33 of our top 100 merchants had our latest checkout integrations, and we had an aspiration to be at 50 by the end of the year. I'm pleased to report that now 43 of our top 100 merchants are on our latest, checkout integration. We're making really good progress around that. We're not about doing just like the basics. We are improving availability. Latency is now improved by 45% year-over-year. Every couple of milliseconds increases conversion rates on that. Passwordless is really important for us.

You know, the rollout of pass keys, some other authentication methodologies that we're using now, X the EU, which has SCA, strong customer authentication, we're at about 70% of our checkouts that are passwordless. That's going to continue to go up as we push pass keys, and we're now taking pass keys into the EU, which will be very beneficial because you can actually take out the friction of SCA in those conversions as well. We're going to push that really hard. Then you see all the other big initiatives that we're doing. The pre-introduction, you know, pre-approved amounts for buy and BNPL. By the way, in the US, we've rolled that out to 60 million of our customers.

We are seeing 25%-30% increase in first-time users of buy now, pay later, and those are using it 5%-10% more in terms of the overall TPV than those that didn't have the pre-approved amounts. We're going to roll out another 50 million pre-approved into the EU the beginning of this quarter. We're taking our rewards up, you know, our rewards and cashback. We saw a 20% increase in the number of people using it from Q1 to Q2, are now up over 10 million people using our rewards. When they use our rewards, their TPA goes up by 32%. These are some of the things that we're doing that are making a big difference.

We've got a lot of things planned for Q3, and we're beginning to see it in the results, and hope to be able to continue to point that out and continue to highlight what we hope to be increased growth in branded checkout.

Jason Kupferberg (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for all the thoughts.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yes.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of David Togut with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

David Togut (Senior Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

... thank you. Can you provide an update on your cost takeout plan for 2023, the progress you've made? Do you have any preliminary thoughts quantifying how OpEx reductions will carry into 2024?

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yeah. Thank, thanks for that, David. I'll start, and then probably Gabs will jump in on this. Look, we're gonna continue to do surgical discipline in our, in our cost structure. It was down 11% in Q2. For the full year, we still expect that to decline, consistent with what we talked about by 10%. And therefore, when we think about our operating margin expansion, coming up by at least 100 basis points and some of that incremental pressure that we're absorbing on the credit side, that, as Gabs mentioned, will kind of move through our numbers by the end of the year. You're obviously seeing, you know, growing margin expansion driven by some of the top-line enhancements we're doing, not just the, the cost discipline that we've demonstrated.

I would just say that this is not just about efficiencies, but this is about doing things faster and accelerating the velocity of our innovation. You know, it's not about trade-offs. It's about lower cost, but higher performance. You're seeing that because, like, look at our NPS being at seven-year highs. Look at the amount of innovation that we're now pumping through the, the system right now. We're getting more done more efficiently. There's no question that AI is going to impact every single company and every function, just as it will inside of PayPal. You know, we've been experimenting with 200 of our developers using, you know, tools from both Google, Microsoft, as well as Amazon. We are seeing 20%-40% increases in engineering productivity.

Just imagine that in terms of how much more product we can get into the market and how efficiently we can do that. I think we've always known and anticipated that AI will drive productivity improvements, really, for foreseeable future. But I think the exciting, more unexpected result is that we think it's gonna transform our value proposition, as well. You know, things like enabling us to look into all of our transactions, look at early fraud, metrics, be able to feed that back to customers with early fraud alerts that assure them that we are protecting them. Enabling them to add more and more financial instruments to us, as well, that we can protect this PayPal assistant. That's really an AI chatbot. We've been using it internally inside our consumer app. It's pretty amazing what it can do.

Obviously, our advanced checkout, things like customized rewards. AI is gonna be a thing that not only drives productivity improvements for us, but really importantly, value proposition improvements for us. We're surgical in our costing. We've been very disciplined in it. We're quite pleased with it, and I think we'll see productivity improvements over the years to come.

Gabrielle Rabinovitch (SVP and Acting CFO)

Yeah, you know, as Dan said, we're on track for a 10% decline in our other OpEx for the year. The first half is, is down kind of low double digits, call it 11.5%-12%. In the back half of the year, of course, we begin to lap some of the cost savings that we began, we began to take out last year. So the decline in, in other OpEx declines a bit, and so we'll be in sort of the high, high single digits then. You know, building on what Dan said, just around delivering better experiences to our customers and the productivity gains, it's also coming from the platform migration and consolidation work that we're doing, and that too allows us to scale more efficiently over time.

You should expect to see us continue to look for ways to deliver better experiences to our customers and scale them efficiently on our platform.

David Togut (Senior Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line... Sorry, we have time for one last question, and it comes from the line of Bryan Keane with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Bryan Keane (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, guys.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Hey, Brian.

Bryan Keane (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for. How you doing, Dan? Thanks for.

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Good.

Bryan Keane (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

let me ask you a question here. I wanted to ask about, you know, the, the consumer value prop, and a big piece of that is gonna be the wallet and the enhancements o- of the wallet, including offers. Can you just talk about some of the initiatives you're doing there that's going to improve the digital wallet going forward?

Dan Schulman (President and CEO)

Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question. I mean, obviously, increasing the number of consumers who use our digital wallet, it's one of our most important initiatives, because we feel it's gonna drive both engagement, ARPA, and monthly active users. You know, the app user today, the typical app user has a 35% greater ARPU, 60% greater TPV, and 25% less churn. The more we can put on that, the better. About 55% of our base today uses the app, just to give you an idea of that. The app, to your point, you know, is designed to. It's designed to enable the full shopping experience from discovery, which is like the deals and offers that, that you just mentioned, to flexible payments, you know, the widest array of funding choices.

things like buy now, pay later, split tender, that enables you to utilize two different funding sources to buy your purchase. To post-purchase, which includes, you know, package tracking and returns management, refunds directly into your PayPal wallet. Yeah, I won't go in again to all the experimentation we're doing, but you can see kind of the tremendous amount of velocity there. The new features that are coming into the wallet include this early frauds alert. We've scaled that now to 10%. That's really designed to protect our customers. We can see fraudulent signals well before others. We can let a consumer know that their card has been compromised. We can simultaneously let the FI know so that that card can be reissued instantaneously.

We're seeing early but really positive response to consumers from this, and it causes them, again, these are alerts that come, it causes them to open the app. The more they open the app, the more they do with us. I think I mentioned on the rewards cashback, that will be something that we'll be putting some resource into because we're seeing a tremendous interest in it. You know, these users are up 20% quarter-over-quarter, and the TPA is gigantic improvement, as I mentioned, about a 32% improvement on that. Package tracking, we're now 100% ramped across iOS and Android. It scrapes basically your Gmail account to look for any of your e-commerce orders. They don't even have to be through PayPal. We consolidate them all into one place, into our PayPal app.

We're seeing a 20% app engagement uplift for those who sign up for that, a 10% improvement in TPA. Things like savings, you know, that's now at a 4.3% interest rate. You know, when somebody does that, their ARPA goes up $26, and their login to the app goes up 16 times, those who don't have a savings account with us. I mentioned buy now, pay later, pre-approval. That's, you know, $50 million more to come this quarter in the EU. And we'll start things like our advanced AI checkout with our first clients later this year, and our PayPal assistant using AI technology as well. Those are just some of the things to come. There's a lot of innovation.

As I mentioned, my, my hats off to the team, because I think they're just doing a great job, hitting their schedule, doing constant experimentation, and really making our experiences much improved and moving towards best in class. Thanks everyone, for your great questions. I really appreciate it. I want to thank everybody for your time, and we look forward to speaking to all of you later. Take care. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your line.