New Venmo enhancements enable local small businesses to be discovered and grow

SAN JOSE, Calif. /PRNewswire/ — PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: PYPL) today announced six new innovations the company is piloting and bringing to market this year to revolutionize commerce through artificial intelligence (AI) driven personalization for both merchants and consumers. During the PayPal First Look keynote, Alex Chriss, President and CEO, introduced: a completely new PayPal checkout experience that radically speeds up check out for consumers and helps merchants convert transactions like never before; Fastlane by PayPal, a dramatically faster and smarter guest checkout experience; Smart Receipts, giving customers AI-personalized recommendations from merchants to keep them coming back; the PayPal advanced offers platform so merchants can provide relevant, personalized, real-time offers to consumers and drive more sales; a reinvented PayPal consumer app giving shoppers new ways to earn cash back and more reasons to use PayPal; and, Venmo’s enhanced business profiles, so small businesses can find and engage new customers, and grow their businesses.

“PayPal is on a mission to revolutionize commerce, globally, and today we are starting the next chapter,” said Alex Chriss, President and CEO, PayPal. “With nearly 400 million consumer accounts, and 35 million merchant accounts, PayPal handles transactions for about a quarter of the world’s e-commerce transactions each year, but more importantly, shoppers trust PayPal to power their payments.”

Chriss continued, “PayPal is introducing six new innovations that will not only solve real customer pain points, but we believe will change the world of payments and commerce. From new solutions for merchants to speed up checkout and personalize offers, to a new consumer app that will give our loyal customers more reasons to shop with PayPal, to the next generation of Venmo designed to be the growth platform for local small businesses, PayPal has always brought the future of money to our consumers and merchants and today marks the next revolution.”

With digital commerce expected to exceed $6 trillion in 2024¹, merchants need new, advanced ways to speed consumers through checkout in a seamless way that reduces lost sales. Additionally, consumers are continuously looking to stretch their budgets and get as much value while shopping as possible. PayPal’s global scale and extensive data set, combined with the power of AI, will deliver the next generation of value for both consumers and merchants.

Transforming Checkout

Checkout is the last interaction between a consumer and a merchant, and while it seems so simple, any friction can disrupt the moment. Business owners want to focus on the next sale and consumers are looking to remove any annoying interruptions like password prompts or lagging response times. To address this, PayPal has massively accelerated the checkout process to get customers to choose PayPal, integrate passkeys to enable customers to log in with their face or fingerprint with one tap, and to improve latency. In fact, this will reduce latency by as much as 50%², and enable customers to check out twice as fast, all with the same level of security and trust they have come to expect from PayPal. Additionally, the new PayPal checkout will also leverage AI to get smarter and faster over time.

Introducing Fastlane by PayPal

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Merchants are losing out on sales because the guest checkout process is both slow and cumbersome. Additionally, shoppers do not often sign in or sign up while browsing, and when they are ready to check out, they must find their password, update their credit card information, or shipping address. To help, PayPal is introducing Fastlane by PayPal, a new one-click guest checkout experience that merchants using PayPal’s platform will be able to offer their shoppers, allowing them to make a fast and painless purchase. Customers simply save their information with Fastlane to check out in as little as one tap. No username or password to remember, no personal information to update, and no need to share a credit card with businesses all over the web.

PayPal has been piloting Fastlane by PayPal with a group of merchants and are seeing astounding early results. Select merchants on BigCommerce, a leading open software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce platform and longtime PayPal partner, have seen early results showing that Fastlane can recognize 70% of guests³ and accelerated checkout speeds of nearly 40% compared to a traditional guest checkout process.⁴

Introducing PayPal Smart Receipts

Merchants want to incentivize customers to come back, and consumers want to find the best deals, so PayPal is eliminating the guesswork for both with the introduction of Smart Receipts. When consumers shop with PayPal, they will receive a receipt that allows them to not only track their purchase, but also harnesses AI to predict what they may want to buy next from that merchant. As a result, now merchants will be able to include a personalized recommendation along with a cashback reward offer on the receipt.

As almost 45% of PayPal customers globally open their email receipts everyday⁵ – an incredible open rate – this could mean tens of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers seeing timely, hyper-relevant recommendations and rewards in these receipts. This increases the opportunities for merchants to re-engage directly with their customers, increasing the probability of repeat shopping and business growth.

PayPal is also leveraging AI-powered suggestions that are based on shopper behavior data, combined with the scale of what PayPal can see across the web. Through personalized AI, PayPal is giving any sized merchant the power of being one of the largest retailers in the world.

Introducing PayPal Advanced Offers Platform

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Today, when consumers shop online their experience includes ads generated by their browsing behavior only, which can be irrelevant and frustrating. In response, PayPal will use unique customer insights to build a dynamic, truly personalized advanced offers platform giving merchants the ability to reach customers based on what they have actually bought across the internet, down to the stock keeping unit (SKU) and the individual product. This new, performance-based offers platform has the potential to use AI to organize and analyze data from nearly half a trillion dollars’ worth of merchant transactions globally⁶. The platform will also allow merchants to customize offers for customers, and merchants will only pay for performance, not impressions or clicks. For PayPal consumers, it means they will get more relevant offers, and more opportunities to earn rewards.

PayPal is also building transparent, easy-to-use privacy controls so if a customer does not want their data shared with merchants to personalize their shopping experience – they can opt in or out. 

Reinventing the PayPal app

PayPal is also reinventing the PayPal app to give loyal customers even more reasons to shop and pay with PayPal every day. Too often consumers are served the top items from the largest merchants that can afford to buy the best search terms. Additionally, consumers are still feeling the inflationary pinch and looking for ways to spend smarter and find the best deals. This is why PayPal is introducing CashPass to give customers access to hundreds of exciting, personalized cash back offers from top brands in the U.S. A user will simply need to tap on the offer, shop at that business, and check out with PayPal. CashPass uses AI to organize personalized offers for customers based on shopping behaviors, and customers will regularly discover new cash back offers giving them more reasons to visit the app.

Starting in March, PayPal is planning to launch CashPass with an amazing set of launch partners, so consumers can access offers from merchants such as Best Buy, eBay, McDonald’s, Priceline, Ticketmaster, Uber, and Walmart.

PayPal CashPass users will also be able to stack with other PayPal rewards such as cash back from the PayPal Cashback Mastercard®. Users can then put cash back into a PayPal Savings account and earn more on top.

Introducing the Next Generation of Venmo Business Profiles

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Venmo introduced business profiles in 2021 to provide an affordable and easy way for businesses to accept payments and grow their business and has grown to a community of more than 90 million active accounts. Small businesses rely on word-of-mouth, social media, and reviews on other sites for referrals. It can be difficult to stand out on social media, and one bad review can set their business back. Venmo is solving this by introducing enhanced Venmo business profiles to help small businesses be discovered like never before. The next evolution of business profiles will add subscribe buttons, profile rankings, and the ability to offer promotions to consumers, bringing powerful new ways for businesses to drive traffic, generate sales, and more meaningfully grow their business through increased visibility in the Venmo app.

For consumers, they will be able to discover top-ranked businesses endorsed by their network and enjoy cashback deals when supporting local businesses in their community. No other mobile payment service has a social feed as active, useful and as personal as Venmo, and this is a revolution in providing real-time offers and promotions at a hyper-local level for small businesses. The same type of privacy controls will be available on Venmo, as on PayPal.

All of these new experiences will begin rolling out in the United States throughout 2024.

For more information, visit http://www.paypal.com/us/whats-new/first-look.

¹ Insider Intelligence, “Ecommerce growth worldwide will pick up before tapering off,” Aug. 23, 2023
² Based on PayPal internal data from October to November 2023.
³ Based on PayPal internal data from October 1 to November 2, 2023.
⁴ Based on PayPal Internal data from November 2 to November 18, 2023.
⁵ Based on PayPal internal data from November 1, 2023 to January 8, 2024.
⁶ Based on PayPal internal data from Global Branded XO TPV for the 12-month period between Dec’22 to Nov’23.

About PayPal

PayPal has remained at the forefront of the digital commerce revolution for more than 25 years. By leveraging technology to make sending money and shopping more convenient, affordable, and secure, the PayPal platform is empowering hundreds of millions of consumers and merchants in more than 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. For more information, visit https://www.paypal.com, https://about.pypl.com/ and https://investor.pypl.com/.

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Forward-Looking Statements 

This press release contains “forward-looking” statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information relate to future events and future performance and reflect, among other things, PayPal’s plans with respect to product innovation. Forward looking statements may be identified by words such as “seek”, “believe”, “plan”, “estimate”, “anticipate”, “expect”, “project”, “forecast”, or intend”, and statements that an event or result “may”” “will”, “should”, “could”, or “might” occur or be achieved and any other similar expressions. 

Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. More information about these and other factors can be found in PayPal Holdings, Inc.’s most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), and its future filings with the SEC. 

The forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof.  PayPal expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based. 

SOURCE PayPal Holdings, Inc.

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NASA is announcing final winners of the 2023 NASA Entrepreneurs Challenge, which focused this year on lunar exploration and climate science.

Entrepreneurs from across the United States came together at the Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit and Expo in Washington to pitch their ideas to a panel of NASA judges and venture experts. Winning organizations will be awarded an $85,000 grand prize for technologies that advance the agency’s science goals.

“Science and technology work hand in hand,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Our science goals are advanced by creative new technologies, and challenges like this open doors to innovative ideas from entrepreneurs around the country. We are always looking for the brightest, cutting-edge ideas to help NASA move forward its visionary research regarding Earth, the Moon, and the entire universe.”

The 2023 NASA Entrepreneurs Challenge sought solutions in two areas: to provide ideas for lunar payloads that may attract non-governmental funding for delivery to the surface of the Moon by a commercial provider; and climate science to obtain high quality data from small, hosted instruments, as well as new business models for using existing climate data to address climate and environmental problems. Earlier this year, 11 challenge participants were selected as Round 1 winners, and received $16,000 each to advance to the final, second round of the challenge.

The Round 2 Winners are as follows:

• Visual-Inertial Position & Navigation for Moon by Skyline Nav AI
• Lunar Anti-Dust Microgrid Payload by Front Range
• Deep Detection of Methane in Satellite Data by GeoLabe
• Cislune Lunar Fuel Refinery and Exporter by Cislune
• Ringside Seats: Mote Lunar Landing Support System by Space Initiatives
• Robotic Utility Transmission Infrastructure by BlinkSpace
• PRISM: Personal RealTime Insight from Spatial Maps by Pegasus Intelligence and Space

In addition to the monetary prize, the challenge provided winners with exposure to external funders and investors, and offered insight into how entrepreneurs can work with NASA in the future. NASA emphasized reaching entrepreneurs from historically underrepresented communities.

To learn more about the award, visit:

https://www.nasaentrepreneurchallenge.org

Source: NASA

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DALLAS /PRNewswire/ — T.D. Jakes Enterprises, a social impact holding company, in conjunction with its national initiative, the Good Soil Movement, today announced its first-ever holiday gift guide highlighting a wide array of products in time for the holidays. The Good Soil Gift Guide will go live nationally on Friday, December 1 to help shoppers support small Black-owned and minority businesses. Good Soil members can start uploading their listings today.

As the country looks to bring together support for small businesses during Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, under-resourced and historically marginalized people are often excluded from the conversation and that’s precisely why the Good Soilmovement has quickly become the leading platform for small business empowerment.

“Our mission with the Good Soil movement is to grow and impact one million businesses and for those businesses to also reach at least $1 million in revenue throughout their entrepreneurship journey,” said Michael Phillips, chief operations officer for T.D. Jakes Enterprises. “As we stand together alongside these entrepreneurs, cultivating prosperity, we’re breaking through barriers, proving that the American entrepreneurial spirit knows no color. Good Soil has grown to almost 20,000 members and we are proud of every single entrepreneur that has joined this movement. This list is a celebration of hard work and Black entrepreneurship.”

With hundreds of businesses represented, the Good Soil Gift Guide will be free and open to anyone, beyond Good Soil app users. This guide isn’t a one-time release but a dynamic, living resource. Launching on December 1st, the guide will remain continuously updated throughout the year, adapting to seasonal shifts and celebrating occasions like Small Business Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Valentine’s Day, etc.

While Good Soil is not responsible for the content of the individual listings, it is ensuring that no illegal products, vice items, or potential pyramid schemes are included — only product and service categories that are deemed generally safe and beneficial.

To submit a product to be featured, the business must join the ever-expanding Good Soil network at the “Impact” level, which is free. The Good Soil Plus App offers exclusive business networking communities, organized by industry and location and gives users exclusive mentorship, fellowship, financing and deals. Learn more here.

The Good Soil Gift Guide can be accessed by consumers here: https://gifts.goodsoilmovement.com

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About T.D. Jakes Enterprises
Part of the T.D. Jakes Group, T.D. Jakes Enterprises is a social impact holding company with an innovative portfolio steeped in content creation, cultural change, community development and capital investments. The mission is to create high impact content and opportunities that disrupt convention and culture. T.D. Jakes Enterprises includes work in television, film, books, mentorship, real estate, music and entrepreneurship. Visit https://tdjenterprises.com to learn more.

SOURCE T.D. Jakes Enterprises