Shares in PayPal moved up by four percent after the company reported better-than-expected 21.4% growth in revenues to $3.24 billion and adjusted operating profit of $560 million.

PayPal president Dan Schulman hailed the results as "possibly our strongest quarter as a standalone company" and proceeded to reel off an impressive list of metrics to highlight the company's spectacular growth curve.

Chief among these was the addition of 8.2 million net new active accounts in the quarter, 90% up year over year. In total the company now claims more than 200 million consumers and more than 17 million merchants.

"We now expect to add almost 30 million net new active accounts to the PayPal platform in 2017," says Schulman.

A sharp rise mobile payments helped stoke the engine. Approximately 35% of payment volume came through a mobile device and mobile payment volume increased 54% over the same period last year to approximately $40 billion.

OneTouch, the one-click mobile checkout, now has more than 70 million consumer accounts opted in, and is accepted by more than 6 million merchant accounts.

PayPal's popular social payments app, Venmo, now locked in a battle with US banks for market share, reported $9.4 billion of payment volume, an increase of 93% year over year, as well as its largest quarter of customer acquisition.

As an adjunct to the results statement, PayPal also signalled a more forceful drive into the P2P payment space, announcing an expansion of its partnership with Facebook that will allow users to send and request money via the social media giant's Messenger app.