PayPal reported its strongest-ever quarterly growth in payment volume in Q4 with $277 billion as the pandemic fueled online transactions

• PayPal reported its strongest quarterly growth in total payment volume in Q4 with $277 billion.
• That's a 39% increase from Q4 2019, when the company reported $199 billion in total payment volume.
• PayPal enjoyed a surge in use in 2020 as the pandemic drove more online transactions.

PayPal said it reported its strongest quarterly growth in total payment volume in its fourth-quarter earnings with $277 billion, a 36% increase from Q4 2019.

PayPal CFO John Rainey made the comment in a Wednesday earnings call after the company posted its Q4 results, with revenue of $6.12 billion and earnings-per-share of $1.32.

Both Rainey and CEO John Schulman stressed on the call and in its Q4 results that 2020 was PayPal's best year in its history, a milestone that coincided with unprecedented online shopping numbers as the pandemic kept people inside and out of brick and mortar stores, especially during the holidays.

Schulman emphasized that a "digital-first world" is now our reality.

"Consumers no longer want to handle cash," Schulman said on the call. He also touched on Venmo users cashing their stimulus checks in the app, which PayPal acquired in 2013.

Read more: PayPal workers were struggling to make ends meet. CEO Dan Schulman vowed to change that.

While PayPal reported a record-breaking quarterly growth rate in total payment volume, growth in other areas appears to have slowed slightly compared to earlier in 2020.

PayPal reported 16 million net new active users in Q4 compared to 20.2 million in Q1 2020. In April 2020 alone, PayPal gained 7.4 million new active users, a new record for the digital payment company. The company saw its strongest quarter in PayPal's history in Q2, during the first few months of the pandemic, adding 21.3 million net new active users.

Read more: These 8 PayPal execs are leading the company during a record period of growth as e-commerce and digital payments boom

PayPal said the company ended 2020 with a total of 377 million active accounts and expects to add 50 million net new active accounts in 2021.

The company also noted that it signed on a slew of new merchants in 2020, including Footlocker, Levi's, Macy's, Uniqlo, and others.