Amy Bonitatibus, PayPal’s chief corporate affairs officer, shared in a video interview for CMO Insider how Venmo is playing ball with college athletes, and PayPal’s new opportunities in agentic commerce. Bonitatibus has been at PayPal since May, 2024 and held previous leadership positions at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.
Following is an edited transcript and video of the interview.
When you think PayPal, you think trusted, safe, secure, and dependable. And then you’ve got Venmo, which is this huge, culturally relevant brand. Few brands have the benefit of being a verb, and we take that very seriously.
College sports was ultimately disrupted when this ruling came down that requires universities now to pay student athletes for using their name and likeness. For us, already being on campus, and Venmo being the way that athletes and students pay for all everyday expenses, it was a no-brainer for us to engage the largest conferences and look for a safe way to process and make those payments to student athletes.
We’re talking tens of millions of dollars that are going through the system now to young athletes that maybe haven’t seen that kind of money. So for us it was an opportunity not only to process the transaction, but also to provide financial literacy to those athletes, and bring them closer to the brand.
Now the marketing sponsorship piece of it is — debit cards at these campuses, and even for alumni. People are so loyal to their college and universities, but to have that now for Venmo is awesome.
What we’re seeing is this evolution of not only peer-to-peer payments — which is what Venmo is known for — but now to be able to pay everyday expenses using your debit card and pay with Venmo, which you see on thousands and thousands of websites, and that continues to scale. It’s kind of taken the brand to the next level.
Venmo’s cross-generational appeal
I honestly can say I wasn’t surprised at the power of Venmo. When we look across our demographic, it’s amazing. You’ve got the 50-plus-year-old mothers who literally use it every day, to the students that I talked about across college campuses.
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It’s a beloved brand across lots of demographics, which has been exciting. It allows us to be able to personalize and customize the messaging based on who we’re trying to reach for that campaign, or for the capability that we’re really trying to drive.
The next wave in e-commerce
PayPal is a special brand that’s been around for 25 years, the pioneer of e-commerce. When we think about what’s next for PayPal and how do we create that competitive advantage as we had in the early days of the brand, the opportunity is obvious — it really is agentic commerce.
Today you see these agents and they’re being used more and more for simple searches. ‘Hey, what’s the most popular red sweater being sold today?’ It populates that red sweater, but what creates a clunky experience is they then have to go to a different site to purchase the red sweater.
What we’re doing is we’re partnering with a lot of those agentic companies to say PayPal can help fulfill that payment, so that it’s end-to-end. The red sweater is populated, we already know generally what size sweater that customer wears — now all they have to do is select it and do a tap-to-pay to be able to process that through PayPal.
We’ve already negotiated and have in market today those partnership opportunities and those capabilities, and I think we’re just scratching the surface there. I’m really excited for the future of agentic commerce with PayPal.