Paypal for your portfolio?

The shift to digital payments has fueled market-beating gains for stocks such as Paypal (Nasdaq: PYPL), and there’s still room for more growth. Paypal has a sizable and growing customer base of 277 million. The total value of all payments made across its various services totaled $578 billion last year, and the total payment volume continues to grow at around 25% per year, excluding currency changes.

The company’s most promising long-term profit engine is Venmo, a wildly popular payment platform that has more than 40 million active accounts and is processing payment volume at an annualized rate of more than $84 billion — while growing fast. (Its total payment volume grew at a staggering 73% year-over-year pace in the first quarter.) Venmo has been integrated into several popular platforms, such as Uber, Grubhub, Fandango and Hulu.

Paypal continues to add new users to its platform, despite its already massive size. During the first quarter alone, the company netted 9.3 million new active users and processed $161 billion in payments.

New partnerships — with Instagram, Latin America’s online marketplace Mercadolibre and others — have the potential to fuel even more growth.

Paypal’s stock may not look like a screaming bargain with its forward-looking price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio recently near 33, but it holds great promise for patient investors. (The Motley Fool owns shares of and has recommended Paypal.)