PayPal Holdings, Inc. PYPL

The business

PayPal is the yellow button at checkout and the thing your neighbour uses to pay you back. Branded checkout is the profitable half: the consumer already has an account, the merchant pays a full rate, and nobody has to enter a card number. Braintree is the unbranded half, processing card payments for large merchants who put their own name on the page, at a fraction of the margin.

That distinction is the whole company. Braintree volume is cheap to win and thin to keep, branded volume is the franchise. Four hundred and thirty-nine million active accounts is an enormous installed base and it has not grown in four quarters.