PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Darrin Peller : Thanks, guys. Dan, I also want to reiterate what Lisa said. Sorry to see you go, but I can only concur that you are very young mid-60s person that we all try to be like. Let me just ask more on the expectations, if you don’t mind. I mean — and to be sure that you or Gabrielle. You guys touched on, I guess, embedding mid-single digits in the guide, or maybe better than that with your expectation to achieve better. How should we think about the cadence just considering how much higher the growth rate should be starting off in Q1 per your guidance? And then if you can give us any color on expectations around transaction revenue or OVAS and Braintree or core branded, anything else that could be provided would be great. Thanks guys.

Daniel Schulman : Yeah. So Darrin, I want to separate out two things that I was afraid might be conflated, which aren’t linked. The first one is, when we were looking at our cost structure to deliver an 18% EPS growth and to make sure that we fully staffed our high conviction growth areas. We wanted to look at what we thought would be a worst-case revenue assumption, because we don’t want to be chasing our cost structure for, we were like, okay, what’s the worst case going to happen. We could do mid-single digits FXN growth. That would mean that you’ve got Europe going into recession, U.S. going into recession, inflation stays high, discretionary spend remains muted. And that’s what we built our cost structure around to give us and to give you high confidence that the 18% that we’re guiding to is something that we can deliver in pretty much any economic scenario that we could imagine.

So that’s kind of assumption set number one was around our cost structure and the revenue around it. Number two though, is our revenue expectations. And we clearly are expecting something very different than the worst-case scenario that we have in place for our cost structure. We’re assuming, as we think about the year ahead that we hold or slightly grow our share globally. As Gabs said in her remarks, there’s a lot of moving parts that could happen here, and we want to be responsible in our guidance for revenues. And we saw last year that revenue can move from quarter-to-quarter, but we’re pretty darn accurate when we guide in the quarter ahead. And so we put out a 9% revenue guide in Q1. And frankly, Darrin, Q1 is off to a very strong start for us.

We’re seeing widespread acceleration both in January and February. We’re seeing it in branded checkout, which has stepped up quite nicely from Q4. We’re seeing it in our Braintree services as well. Buy Now Pay Later continues to accelerate for us. So much stronger than we expected. We wouldn’t say 9% if we didn’t feel confident in that number, as well as the 24% at the midpoint on our EPS guide. There’s still a lot of the year ahead of us, right? We’re five-six weeks into the first quarter, but it’s clearly off to a very strong start, and we will have more as we report out Q1 earnings, as we look into Q2 that may inform how we’re thinking about the full year. But we just didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves. And also, we want to be really responsible in the guidance that we give.

Anything you would to add to that, Gabs?