PYPL PayPal Holdings Inc

By Maria Armental 

PayPal Holdings Inc. has reached a roughly $4 billion deal to buy shopping and rewards platform Honey Science Corp., as it pushes to offer a broader array of services.

PayPal executives, in a conference call with analysts, said the proposed deal -- PayPal's largest to date -- would serve as "a springboard for PayPal's broader commerce initiatives."

PayPal was spun off in 2015 from eBay Inc., which remains one of its biggest sources of payments volume but is due to switch payment processing to Adyen NV next year.

Honey, which is profitable and generated more than $100 million in revenue in 2018, helps people find discount codes online, working with the likes of AliExpress, the retail arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.; Walmart Inc.; Adidas AG; and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE's Sephora.

It also helps merchants target consumers by developing personalized offers.

PayPal executives say that Honey, which will be embedded into its apps, would help drive deeper engagement with its 300 million customers while helping merchants target new customer segments.

Honey's roughly 17 million active monthly users, they said, skew young and overlap to some extent with PayPal's digital money-transfer service, Venmo.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter and add to earnings, on an adjusted basis, starting in 2021.

Josh Beckerman contributed to this article.

Write to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 20, 2019 19:38 ET (00:38 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.