PayPal has announced six new features coming to PayPal and Venmo designed to give payment processes a much-needed boost, and to ensure that payments are always made on time.
Besides a redesigned checkout experience, PayPal President and CEO Alex Chriss unveiled a handful of other tools, including a smattering of artificial intelligence.
The platform, which has 400 million consumer accounts and 35 million merchant accounts according to the company’s latest figures, now handles around one quarter of the world’s ecommerce transactions annually.
PayPal checkout is getting better
Starting with the checkout experience, the changes are largely behind-the-scenes upgrades that are designed to reduce friction for customers, including improved latency and passkey integration for passwordless logins.
Though end users won’t notice any visible changes, these improvements together with AI will help halve the time that customers spend at checkout, according to PayPal.
A new guest checkout experience is also coming later this year. Called Fastlane, it promises to eliminate the need for accounts and passwords while maintaining a level of security that means customers won’t have to share their payment details directly with online retailers, giving them an additional layer of protection.
The post-shopping experience will also see an AI injection, with Smart Receipts set to get integrated content like suggested products and recommendations based on previous activity, which could see online retailers boost loyalty.
Other changes include revised Venmo business profiles and a tweaked app that will include cashback offers from participating retailers – an initiative PayPal is calling CashPass.
These changes come at a time when digital commerce is expected to account for around $6 trillion this year.
Speaking of the updates, Chriss said: “PayPal has always brought the future of money to our consumers and merchants and today marks the next revolution.”
PayPal says that the updates will roll out to US customers throughout 2024, but there has been no word on availability in other countries so far.
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