PayPal saw a steep rise in the volume of mobile payments, as CEO Dan Schulman updated on the firm’s partnerships with America Movil and Vodafone Group.

The firm processed $21 billion in mobile payment volume in Q1 2016, a growth of 54 per cent over the same period in 2015. Mobile now accounts for 26 per cent of total payment volume (TPV).

Venmo, the PayPal-owned payments app that is popular among millennials, saw its TPV grow to $3.2 billion, an increase of 154 per cent.

Schulman explained that a pilot using Venmo, a P2P app, for in-app payments provided encouraging results. The pilot has been widened to 550,000 Venmo users.

“We are on track to expand to more merchants and open the service to our full Venmo customer base in the second half of this year,” he said.

During the quarter, the firm also introduced PayPal Commerce, a set of tools and APIs which are currently in beta and are designed for merchants to sell to consumers across multiple channels, including e-mail, social share, blogs, articles, ads, in-app – anywhere consumers are online or on mobile devices.

Schulman said PayPal’s pace and scale of innovation is thanks to the investments  made in its core infrastructure and platform. “We run one of the largest private cloud environments in the world.”

In addition, Schulman said Telcel in Mexico and Brazil’s Claro are both implementing its platform to help their 75 million and 65 million subscribers, respectively, manage their money and make purchases using mobile devices.

The deal with the two America Movil-owned units was first announced during this year’s Mobile World Congress.

The digital wallet offerings are now being trialled and are expected to be rolled-out fully in the second half of the year. The app will be available for both Android and iOS.

Consumers will be able to open a PayPal account using only their smartphone and pay for operator services, such as topping up their prepaid phones and buying data plans. Eventually, they will be able to pay for services from other merchants as well as paying bills and sending money.

In Europe, PayPal also unveiled a partnership with Vodafone at Congress that, potentially, enables tens of millions of consumers to use their PayPal accounts as their preferred way to make contactless payments. Consumers with Android smartphones will be able to tap-and-pay at Visa contactless terminals in store.

“We are now live in our first market, Spain, and we anticipate expanding across Europe throughout the back half of 2016,” said Schulman.