CashPass & other AI-enhanced services being introduced to PayPal and its Venmo subsidiary

PayPal announced that it will introduce new AI-enhanced services to its flagship PayPal platform and its Venmo subsidiary.

Within the next few months, PayPal users will have access to CashPass, which is a personalized version of the company’s current offer platform. PayPal will use the customer’s shopping history from different merchants to display personal offers. Users will have the ability to opt in and out of personalized ads.

The company’s sister company, Venmo, will also release new features for merchants and consumers. One feature will allow customers to subscribe or follow a brand that they shopped it. PayPal sees this as a way to let Venmo merchants expand their visibility.

The following transcript of the full video announcement outlines PayPal’s commitment to using AI to enhance the customer and merchant experience.

“Hello everyone and welcome to PayPal First Look. This is our exclusive preview of the most impactful innovations we’re piloting and bringing to market this year. The innovations we believe will change commerce as we know it.

At PayPal, we are on a mission to revolutionize commerce, globally. PayPal handles transactions for nearly 400 million consumer accounts and 35 million merchants in more than 200 markets around the world. That’s almost 25 billion transactions a year, about a quarter of the world’s more than $6 trillion in e-commerce each year. But even more importantly, shoppers trust PayPal to power their payments.

But now, the world is experiencing its next breakthrough in technology: the age of AI. The potential for businesses to leverage insights to acquire more customers, the opportunity for shoppers to get deeply personalized experiences like never before. This is a great time for PayPal to do what it does best and revolutionize commerce, again.

Today I’m going to share with you six new innovations that we believe change the world of payments and commerce. So, let’s dive in, starting with an entirely new checkout experience. If you’re a business owner, what’s top of mind? You want that next sale. And let’s face it, as consumers, we’re all busy. Little interruptions like password prompts or lagging response times can disrupt our shopping. These snags can mean the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

So, we have massively accelerated the checkout process because that’s what our customers expect. Just log in with your face or fingerprint, and in one tap, you are good to go. And this will reduce latency by as much as 50%. This will enable you to check out twice as fast, all with the same level of security and trust you’ve come to expect from us.

But now let’s take it to the next level. Let’s talk about improving the guest checkout experience. Often, shoppers don’t sign in or sign up while browsing, and when they’re ready to check out, they’ve got to find their password or update their credit card info or shipping address. It’s a hassle. No wonder about half the time, as close as they are to making a purchase, they just quit. They ghost you. It’s a frustrating gap for merchants. So, we fixed this.

We developed a new guest checkout experience that merchants using our platform can offer to their shoppers, allowing them to make a fast and painless purchase. We call it Fastlane by PayPal. It couldn’t be simpler. Save your information with Fastlane to check out in as little as one tap. No username or password to remember. No personal info to update. No need to share a credit card with businesses all over the web. PayPal recognizes you. For consumers, it means a remarkably easier shopping process. For every business, large or small, with PayPal, it means more sales.

We’re piloting Fastlane by PayPal right now with a group of merchants, and we’re simply astounded by the early results. Because we can recognize 70% of guests who are PayPal users or have shopped at a PayPal merchant, we can reduce checkout time by almost 40%. BigCommerce, one of our long-time partners, has already implemented Fastlane by PayPal, and their conversion is as high as 70%. And we’re planning to bring the platform, this advantage, to our 35 million merchants around the world.

But we’re not done. Now, let’s take it one step further, and see how we’re helping out merchants turn one-time shoppers into repeat shoppers. Merchants want to incentivize customers to come back. And consumers want to find the best deals. So, we’re eliminating the guesswork. For both. When you shop with PayPal, we’ll send a receipt that not only allows you to track your purchase but also harness AI to predict what you may want next from that merchant. As a result, now merchants will be able to include this personalized recommendation along with a cashback reward offer on the receipt. This is a real game changer for businesses everywhere. It’s called Smart Receipts.

And here’s the best part. The open rate for PayPal email receipts is already astonishing. About 45% of PayPal customers globally open their emailed receipts every day. Imagine what it could mean for tens of millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of customers to see timely, hyper-relevant recommendations and rewards in these receipts. It means millions of opportunities for merchants to re-engage directly with their customers increasing the probability of repeat shopping and business growth.

What’s especially cool about these AI-powered suggestions is that we’re doing something new at incredible scale. For businesses, our suggestions are based on what we know about your shoppers and their broader shopping habits. Not just at your store, but through the scale of PayPal we can also see across the web. Through personalized AI we are giving each of our merchants the power of being one of the largest retailers in the world.

But that’s just the beginning of how we’re using AI to reimagine commerce. We’re also going to use our unique customer insights to build something brand new. A dynamic truly personalized Advanced Offers Platform that we plan to roll out over the next few months, that will change how people shop and how merchants engage with them every day. Today, when consumers shop online their experience includes ads generated by what they’ve looked at or where they’ve browsed before. It can be irrelevant and frustrating so we’re going to revolutionize commerce advertising.

With PayPal’s new Advanced Offers Platform, we’re giving merchants the ability to reach customers based on what they’ve actually bought across the internet. Down to the SKU. Down to an individual product. This is specific merchant data from nearly half a trillion dollars worth of merchant transactions globally. Our new platform can change everything because of the volume and diversity of this data and how we are leveraging AI capabilities to organize and analyze this information. It will allow merchants to customize offers like never before. And only pay for performance, not impressions.

So, for example, if a customer has repeatedly bought beauty products and accessories over the last year, and they have favored a few specific high-end clothing retailers, our algorithms can take the information and now be able to make a personalized recommendation for a blouse from their favorite retailer and serve offers. We’re providing relevant offers for every sized merchant. That’s how you engage meaningfully with customers, new and old, and entice them to return, and that’s how you grow your business.

And if you’re a PayPal consumer it means you’ll get more relevant offers, and more opportunities to earn rewards And, we’re building transparent, easy to use privacy controls. If a customer doesn’t want their data shared with merchants to personalize their shopping experience, they can opt in or out. Your privacy. Your choice. We want to provide our customers with more and more reasons to shop with PayPal. That’s how we turn customers into loyal customers.

And we’re going to do this by solving some clear consumer problems. Today, too often consumers are just served top items from the largest merchants that can afford to buy the best search terms. They’re unable to connect or find the smaller merchants around the world who desperately want them as customers. And to top it all off, money matters. Everyone is feeling the inflationary pinch and looking for ways to spend smarter. Finding the best prices. The best deals. And how to save more money.

That’s why we’re reinventing the PayPal app to give our loyal customers even more reasons to shop and pay with PayPal every day, by giving them incredible offers when they shop with the amazing brands they love. Here’s how it works. Starting this quarter, the new PayPal app will give U.S.-based customers access to hundreds of exciting, personalized cash back offers from top brands in the U.S. When you see an offer you like, you just tap on it. And when you shop with that business the deal automatically applies when you check out with PayPal. One tap it’s that easy. This is PayPal CashPass. We use AI to organize the offers for you based on both how and where you shop. So it’s personalized to you. And you can quickly find your favorites. Best of all there’s no limit to how much cash back you can get. Starting in March we’re planning to launch CashPass with an amazing set of launch partners. The brands we know our customers love, and use every day.

Now with PayPal our customers will be able to get incredible cash back offers from Uber, Walmart, Best Buy, McDonald’s, Ticketmaster and eBay. And we’re not stopping there. Because with PayPal you can stack your cash back to earn even more. So you get CashPass offers with 2, 3, 4, 5%, and more cash back. And when you pay with your PayPal Cashback Mastercard, you get another 3% back on everything you buy with PayPal online. No restrictions, no limits.

Let me give you an example. Samantha spends $200 for her groceries every week. Imagine if she taps a CashPass offer and gets $10 cash back on her weekly groceries for a year. And she uses her PayPal Cashback Mastercard in her PayPal wallet to pay for the groceries online, getting another 3% cash back. And then she puts all the cash back into the PayPal savings account and earns more on top. That all adds up to more than $800 cash back in her wallet for the year. And imagine if she does the same with all her other purchases every day.

Today, we have millions of customers globally that use our network every month and more and more will quickly discover the incredible value PayPal brings on everything they buy. And it’s more money in their pocket when they need it the most. We couldn’t be more excited because when you add it all up, these are the biggest changes to the PayPal app in a decade.

Now, let me shift to the cultural phenomenon that is Venmo. Venmo is mentioned every nine seconds on social media. Absolutely incredible. Venmo is where you treat those who matter most to brunch, or dinner, or split the cost of sporting events or trips with them. Where you pay your kids’ babysitter or that artisan you bought a necklace from. It’s an app that creates real-life community among our more than 90 million active Venmo accounts and our 3 million merchants with business profiles.

If you’re a small business, you rely on word of mouth, social media and reviews on other sites for referrals. But it’s hard to stand out on social, and one bad review, legit or not, can set your business back. And while everyone loves Venmo, it hasn’t enabled small businesses to branch out and discover more ways to connect and grow through this powerful community. Until now.

We are revolutionizing how businesses can use Venmo to be discovered like never before. Introducing our enhanced Venmo business profiles. We are offering an entirely new way to use Venmo to get on someone’s radar and grow your business. First, we’re adding a subscribe button wherever you appear in the feed. Now every time a customer pays you, they’re also giving you a chance to gain subscribers because their friends, neighbors, and the local community will see you.

Second, we’re going to enable small businesses to leverage this exposure to potential customers close by and offer them cash back deals in seconds. That’s real-time marketing for your business on a hyper-local level. So let me give you an example. We’re thrilled to be starting our pilot in Seattle where 3,500 micro-businesses are using Venmo business profiles to promote themselves to thousands of consumers. These businesses will be able to amplify their reach in the feed with customer promotions so consumers receive cash back in their balance to spend however they choose on Venmo.

All of a sudden, Venmo is more than just a great way for local businesses to get paid. Now, it’s also a powerful way to find new customers, drive new traffic, and grow your business. We’re the only ones that can make this happen. No other mobile payment service has a social feed as active, useful, and personal as Venmo. All while giving customers easy-to-use privacy controls just like PayPal. Your privacy, your choice. The potential here is simply incredible. We’re excited to roll this out nationwide throughout 2024.

So, I’ve shared a lot with you today, and it’s all going to be released throughout this year in the U.S., and then globally. To summarize, we’ve shared our newest innovations including a reimagined PayPal Checkout Experience, that gives customers a 50% faster and delightful way to buy. Fastlane by PayPal, a dramatically faster and smarter guest checkout experience that reduces guest checkout completion time by nearly 40%. Smart Receipts. So customers get AI personalized recommendations that are hyper-relevant and merchants can have more meaningful post-sale interactions.

PayPal Advanced Offers Platform for merchants to serve the most relevant, personalized, real-time offers to our massive consumer base. In a way that gives them privacy and choice. A new Consumer App that will give our loyal customers more reasons to shop with PayPal. With more rewards and more money in their pockets for the things they do every day. And, Venmo’s enhanced business profiles. The new growth platform for small businesses. Our team is fired up to get these new innovations in the hands of our customers. If you are ready to get started, visit PayPal.com and let’s go.

PayPal has always brought the future of money to our consumers and merchants and today marks the next revolution. And the best part? We’re just getting started. I’ll see you all soon.”