- Pomeroy delivers on all three priorities set six months ago: near-universal tokenization adoption, PayPal's first omnichannel government deal, and Australia/Europe fully unified onto one global platform.
- His remit expands into Payment Services & Crypto, merging enterprise and small-business processing with crypto's 600M wallets.
In this edition we will spotlight Jeff Pomeroy, Payment Services & Crypto.
Executive Summary
Six months after setting an ambitious agenda that included unifying PayPal’s global platform, expanding in-store, and scaling value-added services, Jeff Pomeroy is back on The Quarterly Review with progress to show on all three.
He also plants a flag on a newly broadened mandate: one platform for every business, every channel, and every payment modality — future-proofed with crypto and agentic commerce. And he shares his read on trends worth watching, including where he thinks the next durable moat in payments will be built, and what he’s doing to build it.
“When we last spoke, I framed our work around one idea: intense focus,” Pomeroy said. “Now I’m coming up for air to tell you about it.”
Here is what Pomeroy and his team have accomplished since our last conversation:
- Made value-added services like network tokenization self-serve, converting nearly all merchants in a recent free-trial.
- Closed a string of omni-channel deals via Verifone, including PayPal’s first omnichannel government contract.
- Brought Australia and Europe fully onto PayPal’s unified platform and began moving processing in-house.
- Broadened his remit into a new org, Payment Services & Crypto, unifying enterprise, small-business, crypto, and agentic commerce.
The Full Review
A few quarters ago, Pomeroy set three priorities for PayPal’s enterprise payments business: a unified global platform, in-store expansion via Verifone, and scaled value-added services. Six months later, he’s back with what he calls a clean sweep.
“The short version is that we stayed the course,” Pomeroy said. “This is an industry that produces a new shiny object every week, and most of the discipline is in not chasing it.”
That discipline came from guardrails he’d put in place, measuring every initiative against merchant demand, ROI, and contractual obligations.
“That discipline is showing up exactly where it should,” he said, “in the deals we’re closing, the services merchants are turning on, and how we’re executing in the public market.”
Objective 01: Scaling value-added services
Six months ago, the goal was to scale value-added services — network tokenization, smart retries, debit routing, and payouts. Pomeroy says that work has moved from launch to self-serve: merchants can now go into their portal, look at their own reporting, and switch on some of PayPal’s most meaningful services themselves.
“That’s a different business than the one we had a year ago,” he said.
The bigger challenge, he says, was getting merchants to understand what they’re worth. So his team built a proof mechanism that turns on network tokens for free and lets merchants watch what it does to their own numbers.
“We did exactly that with hundreds of merchants recently, and all but one kept the tokens on at the end of the trial,” he said, “because once they could see the value it returned to their payments experience, the decision made itself.”
His team built tooling that surfaces a merchant’s own performance data such as auth rates and costs. “That lets us walk in with the merchant’s own performance in front of us and have a real conversation instead of a sales pitch,” he said.
The team’s speed comes from process restructuring and optimization. PayPal has leaned into AI internally to reduce time-to-live for products, freeing teams to focus their judgment on the parts of a payments problem that actually need a human who understands how the rails behave.
“AI doesn’t replace that,” he said. “It clears the runway so we get to it faster.”
Objective 02: Winning in-store and omni-channel
The Verifone partnership remains, in Pomeroy’s words, the spine of PayPal’s move into physical retail, and he says the deals are coming through. His team has closed an array of omnichannel deals with real net-new volume, despite a deliberately small team in market and a pipeline several times larger than its previously closed business. Among the wins is PayPal’s first government deal in omnichannel.
“Which is not the kind of logo you expect to win in payments this early,” he said, “and exactly the kind of proof point that tells you the model works.”
But Pomeroy is clear that in-store is only part of the ambition. The bigger goal is making PayPal’s and Venmo’s own wallets feel as natural in a physical store as they already do online. He reaches for a nautical analogy to describe why offline is where the growth now lives.
“When we first docked twenty years ago, it was a quiet marina, and it was all ours,” he said. “Now it’s become pretty crowded. So, what do you do when the marina is full? You go find new water to sail. Offline is clear, open water.”
Pomeroy wants a PayPal or Venmo transaction to flow as seamlessly in person as tapping a card, and he wants merchants to offer those wallets first, every time. However, this ambition is additive rather than exclusive.
“We will always take a payment,” he said. “Our obligation is to bring merchants and consumers into these new environments so that every part of the business rises with them.”
Objective 03: One unified platform, globally
Of the three original priorities, Pomeroy says platform unification has been the most satisfying to watch land. Australia is now fully live on PayPal’s global stack, and so is Europe, for both new business coming in and the existing book of merchants. By the end of the year, he expects the migration to be complete, putting every market on one unified payment stack.
“And we’re not stopping at routing transactions through partners,” he said. “The next step is bringing more of the processing in-house, which is already live in its first market.”
The point, Pomeroy stressed, is that the merchant experience stays constant even as the infrastructure underneath it changes. “The merchant keeps one connection the entire time,” he said. “The plumbing behind it changes; their experience doesn’t.”
The bigger mandate: Payment Services, Crypto, and Agentic
Pomeroy’s remit has broadened into a new organization, Payment Services & Crypto, sharpening what he once described as PayPal’s North Star.
“We want to become a flexible platform for all businesses, operating in every channel, with every payment modality,” he said.
Practically, that means merging enterprise and small-business processing into one center of payment excellence. “The question was when, not if,” he said. “The levers we built on the enterprise side and the levers that have lived in small business no longer have to live in separate boxes.”
Crypto belongs on that same platform, he argues. With more than 600 million crypto wallets globally, he sees efficiency gains across settlement, cross-border payments, and payouts.
“It’s becoming part of the global financial infrastructure, and at that point it can’t be a separate business anymore,” he said. “Putting payments and crypto under one roof is how you bring scale and speed to both.”
He also flagged a distribution gap: much of PayPal’s volume now arrives through platforms like BigCommerce, Wix, WooCommerce, and Shopware, where its value-added services have historically been unavailable. “The next leg of the journey is getting our services onto all of those surfaces, so it stops mattering how a merchant reaches us,” he said.
Pomeroy also names agentic commerce as an area he’s watching closely. “In thirty years in payments, you almost never see a genuinely new channel appear,” he said, “and this is one.” With AI agents projected to drive trillions in commerce by decade’s end, he sees the infrastructure for that shift as still unbuilt at scale. “You earn the right to answer those questions by building the foundation and putting up the volume,” he said. “Then you’ve won.”
A word for other leaders
Last time, Pomeroy talked about the leadership habits he tries to model, building a culture that sticks, empowering people rather than making them ask for permission, and carving out time to think. This time, his advice for other leaders is more compact.
“It is too easy to be distracted by the news cycle,” he said. “Focus in on what you can deliver, what drives value for your customers, and where your teams actually take pride in delivering things in a very focused and measurable way. That’s the whole game.”
This may be the final entry in this particular check-in series, but Pomeroy isn’t ready to close the book entirely.
“I know this series is over,” he said, “but I’d love to check in again next year to talk about how our North Star is coming into clearer focus.”