Dive Brief:

• PayPal will prioritize scaling its redesigned checkout experience and biometric adoption in the year ahead, executives said on a Q3 2025 earnings call Tuesday. 
• The company’s redesigned payment experience now accounts for close to one-quarter of global checkout transactions. In cohorts in the U.S. where the new experience is live, conversion has improved nearly 1 point.
• “We're moving quickly but untangling a decade or more of legacy integrations is complex and taking more time than planned,” CEO and President Alex Chriss said.

Dive Insight:

PayPal is working to make payments easier, wherever consumers are spending money. In addition to its redesigned checkout experience, the company is encouraging the adoption of biometric login and preparing for a future in which agentic AI makes purchases on behalf of consumers.

In ongoing testing, PayPal has found that biometric authentication and redesigned paysheets show improved conversion between 2 and 5 percentage points. 

“Consumers benefit from a mobile checkout experience that is second to none while merchants see a higher customer satisfaction and sales,” Chriss said. “It's a win for both sides of our network.”

While the company has seen relatively consistent growth in the number of checkout transactions, average order value has decreased, according to Jamie Miller, the company’s chief financial and operating officer.

Still, net revenues increased 7% year over year to $8.4 billion, according to the earnings release. 

Monthly active accounts climbed 21%, according to Chriss, and the net promoter score globally hit 80. 

The business is also investing in an agentic future. While many consumers use AI tools in their shopping process, most consumers do not trust agentic AI to make purchases on their behalf, and only 13% of consumers say they’ve had an AI complete a purchase after it guided them to a website, Riskified found. Consumers’ biggest concern was payment security. 

But PayPal expects consumer attitudes toward AI making purchases to change. 

“Agentic commerce will take time, but we do believe consumer behavior will shift,” Chriss said. “PayPal is building for that future.”

To prepare, the company entered into a multiyear partnership with Google to create new AI shopping experiences in September. And on Tuesday, PayPal signed a deal with OpenAI to embed its digital wallet into ChatGPT, allowing users to pay for items that they find within the AI tool. PayPal also launched agentic commerce services Tuesday to help merchants sell through AI platforms like Google, OpenAI and Perplexity.

“Our strategy we've laid out very clearly is that we want PayPal to be available anywhere and everywhere that consumers want to pay,” Chriss said. “We want it to be online. We want it to be in-person and we want it to be agentic. And so agentic is just an evolution of this strategy.”