PayPal announced today that it will begin piloting a few new upcoming updates to its service, some of which will leverage AI-driven personalization. The company is introducing a new “CashPass” cash-back offering called “Smart Receipts,” with personalized recommendations, enhanced checkout and guest experiences, Venmo enhancements for small businesses and a new offers platform for merchants.
The company announced that its app is getting a new “CashPass” feature that gives customers access to hundreds of personalized cash-back offers. If you come across an offer you like, all you need to do is click on it, shop at the brand, and then check out with PayPal. The company says CashPass uses AI to organize personalized offers for users based on their shopping behaviors. The app will surface new offers regularly, so customers are encouraged to check it often.
PayPal plans to launch CashPass in March with a handful of partners, including Best Buy, eBay, Priceline, Ticketmaster, Uber, Walmart and McDonald’s. Users will be able to stack the offers with other PayPal rewards, such as cash back from the PayPal Cashback Mastercard.
With PayPal’s new AI-powered “Smart Receipts” feature for customers and brands, when customers shop with PayPal, they will soon receive a receipt that will let them track the order and see predictions of what they may want to buy next from the brand. The receipts will leverage AI-powered suggestions that are based on shopper behavior data, combined with what PayPal can see across the web.
With Smart Receipts, brands will be able to include a personalized recommendation along with a cash-back reward offer on the receipt in order to increase their chances of re-engaging directly with customers.
The company is also launching a new “Fastlane” service that offers a one-click guest checkout experience that will allow users to make quick purchases on merchant websites that use PayPal’s platform. PayPal notes that standard guest checkout experiences are slow and require users to update their credit card information and shipping address. Customers will soon be able to save their information with Fastlane to check out in one tap. They won’t need to enter a username or password or update their personal information.
As for PayPal’s regular checkout experience, the company says it has accelerated it to improve latency to enable customers to check out faster. PayPal is also integrating its Passkey support directly into the redesigned checkout experience. Plus, the checkout experience will leverage AI to get “smarter and faster over time,” the company says.
In addition, PayPal announced that it’s introducing enhanced Venmo business profiles to help small businesses get discovered. Venmo launched business profiles back in 2021 to provide an easy way for businesses to accept payments, but PayPal says it’s aware that it can be hard to stand out on social media and get noticed, which is why it’s launching the next evolution of business profiles. The new profiles will add subscribe buttons, profile rankings and the ability to offer promotions to consumers.
For merchants, PayPal is building a personalized advanced offers platform that will offer them the ability to reach customers based on what they have actually bought across the internet. The platform will use AI to “organize and analyze data from nearly half a trillion dollars’ worth of merchant transactions globally,” PayPal says. The platform will also allow merchants to customize offers for customers. Customers who don’t want their data used to receive more relevant offers can opt out from having their data shared with merchants.