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IF RICK WATSON WAS THE PAYPAL CEO? AN EARNINGS CALL FROM 2028

PayPal Q1 2028 Earnings Call

Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the PayPal First Quarter 2028 Earnings Conference Call. I will now turn the program over to your host, Rick Watson, Chief Executive Officer.

Rick Watson: Thanks, Sarah. And thanks to everyone for joining us. Usually, these calls start with a ten-minute scripted lullaby of non-GAAP adjustments. Not today. If you want the spreadsheets, they’re on the IR site. Today, I want to talk about why we are done playing defense.

For too long, PayPal has been the company that waits for permission to innovate. We waited for Stripe to own the developer experience. We waited for Apple to own the tap-to-pay. We waited for Shopify to own the merchant. Those days are over.

The Post-Purchase Revolution

In Q1, we shifted our focus from the checkout button to the entire commerce lifecycle. We launched PayPal Post-Purchase, a unified tracking and returns engine. Why? Because the transaction doesn't end when the buyer clicks pay. If a consumer has to leave our ecosystem to see where their package is or to initiate a return, we’ve failed.

Early data from our pilot with 500 mid-market retailers shows a 14% increase in repeat purchase velocity when the return is handled directly within the PayPal app. We aren't just moving money anymore; we are moving the friction out of the way.

Venmo: The Operating System for Gen Z

We finally stopped treating Venmo like a social networking experiment and started treating it like a bank. This quarter, we integrated Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Discovery within the Venmo feed.

If you’re a brand, you don’t just want to be a line item on a bank statement; you want to be discovered. We are leveraging our data to put the right brands in front of the right cohorts at the right time. Revenue per active Venmo user is up 22% year-over-year, and it’s not coming from instant transfer fees—it’s coming from commerce.

Radical Simplicity for SMBs

The SMB market has been a "tale of two cities." You have the giants like Shopify, and then you have the millions of service-based businesses left in the cold.

We’ve launched Vertical Payment Stacks for sub-sectors like ghost kitchens and independent creators. We took the onboarding time from days to under 3 minutes. In the Age of Intelligence, speed is the only currency that matters. If we aren't the fastest way for a business to get paid and manage their cash flow, we don’t deserve the business.

Closing Thoughts

I didn't take this job to manage a slow decline. I took it to build the architecture of modern commerce. We are cutting the complexity, we are killing the legacy safety-first mindset, and we are moving with motion over perfection.

THIS WEEK IN THE WATSON WEEKLY ECOMMERCE DIGEST

THE TRUTH ABOUT LAST WEEK: STRIPE AGENTIC COMMERCE SOLUTION LOOKS FAMILIAR

Stripe just showed their hand on agentic commerce. And it's bigger than payments.

The Agentic Commerce Suite isn't a checkout button for AI agents. It's a full merchant operating layer — catalog management, tax configuration, shipping webhooks, fraud scoring, order fulfillment triggers, and return policies. All of it.

Shopify has been saying this for months. Agentic commerce isn't a payment rails problem. It's a commerce infrastructure problem. Who controls the catalog the agent sees? Who sets the tax rules? Who decides which SKUs get surfaced on OpenAI vs. Gemini vs. Perplexity?

Stripe is now building that answer.

The tell is the dual catalog structure. Your dot-com catalog and your agentic catalog are separate. Intentionally. Merchants choose what agents can sell. That's not a payment feature. That's channel strategy.

The back end stays identical — payment intent, webhooks, chargebacks, all normal. What changes is the front door.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026

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