Beyond Payments ─ Reinventing User Experience at PayPay Card

Leader Interviews is a series that introduces the people and ideas behind leaders across the PayPay Group. In this edition, we spoke with Katsuhiro Miyazaki, who assumed the role of President and CEO of PayPay Card Corporation in April 2026.

Continuously Reinventing Ourselves to Stay Chosen

I see my role today as one runner in a relay. PayPay Card is a company that must continue growing for decades to come. Within that journey, I see myself as someone who has received the baton and is now responsible for passing it on to the next generation. That is why the important question is not whether challenges exist. What matters is whether those challenges continue to evolve. The worst situation for any organization is to keep facing the same problems year after year.

Across the PayPay Group, we have already reached a high level in balancing growth and profitability, and we are now entering the next phase of pushing both even further. Payments, user base, data, and monetization are all connected as one ecosystem, and the overall maturity of the business continues to rise year after year. This growth has never been about scale alone. It has been built by creating a structure where products and data work together to drive both growth and profitability simultaneously.

Within that environment, PayPay Card has also grown significantly over the past few years. Our membership base has surpassed 17 million users as of April 2026, and our presence as part of Japan’s payment infrastructure continues to expand. We have become one of the industry leaders in annual net membership growth, particularly among younger generations.

But that is exactly why we need to stop and ask ourselves: “Can we continue earning users’ trust if we remain the way we are today?” Growth alone is not enough. We must become a platform users continue to choose because it consistently delivers meaningful value. That is why we are now trying to transform the structure itself.

Beyond Payments ─ Expanding User Experiences

Credit cards originally derived their value from one simple idea: enabling people to make payments without cash. But as competition intensified and point-reward competition and annual-fee-free offerings became standard, what users expected from payment services began to change. That forced us, as part of the PayPay Group, to rethink a fundamental question: What is a payment experience, and what kind of value should we deliver to users?

Payments are only the starting point. The real value lies in the experiences that can be created before and after the transaction. Across the Group, we are moving toward delivering uniquely PayPay experiences by integrating payments, financial services, and data into one seamless platform. As a future digital financial platform, we want to deliver financial experiences through the app that genuinely transform users’ daily lives. We are trying to expand the entire experience surrounding how people interact with money.

Designing User Experiences with AI at the Core

The foundation for delivering those experiences is AI and data. We possess an enormous amount of data, but simply owning data has no meaning. What matters is whether we can truly understand users through that data and deliver value to them in real time.

Users are constantly changing. Their life stages, income levels, spending behavior, and priorities all evolve over time. That means we must continuously deliver the right experiences based on those changes.

Human effort alone has limits. We need to connect analysis and execution seamlessly, end to end. That is where AI becomes essential. People should focus on deciding what value ought to be delivered. AI should support the execution layer that enables those decisions to happen at scale.

The real question is not whether to use AI. The real question is whether we can design user experiences with AI built into the foundation. This is not simply about efficiency. It is about fundamentally changing the value of the product itself. We believe user experiences are never finished. They must continuously evolve alongside users themselves.

Committed to Being Truly User First

There is one prerequisite behind all of this: being truly user first. I believe our job is to solve problems that many users would willingly pay to have solved. We are not trying to build services that people use simply because they are free. We want to build services users feel they cannot live without. To achieve that, we intentionally challenge ourselves with problems traditional credit card companies would never attempt to solve.

Honestly speaking, this is not easy work. But we believe meaningful experiences can only emerge when we continue confronting those difficult challenges head-on.

Growth Alone Is Not Enough ─ Transforming the Structure

The biggest challenge facing PayPay Card today is clear: We must achieve both growth and profitability at the same time. Our user base is growing. Payment volume is expanding. But our revenue structure is still limited.

As part of the Group, we are expected not only to grow but also to improve profitability simultaneously. We need to evolve beyond relying solely on merchant fees and interest income and strengthen a sustainable revenue structure that continuously creates value. 

One area where we see major potential is what I would call “deeper user understanding.” We have a dedicated Credit Management division that leverages a wide range of data to understand each user and determine the appropriate credit limits for them. Through that process, we are continuously learning more about users’ situations and behavioral changes. But this capability is not only for credit decisions.

As our understanding deepens, we gain the ability to anticipate what users may need next and deliver value proactively. For example, we may recognize when someone is preparing for a trip or considering a major purchase. That opens the possibility of delivering more relevant information, options, and experiences aligned with those moments. These are only examples, but they illustrate the kinds of possibilities we believe can emerge from deeper user understanding.

An important question is where those experiences should be delivered. In addition to physical cards, we also provide services such as “PayPay Credit” through smartphones. Among those touchpoints, what we value most is the experience delivered through the app itself. Physically speaking, it is an extremely limited amount of screen space. That means we cannot fill it with unnecessary information. We must optimize the experience so that each user sees only what is relevant to them. Clear, intuitive, and frictionless experiences matter. That is what we mean by delivering the most relevant experience to each user.

By fully leveraging our assets and evolving our business structure, we aim to return that value directly to users as a better experience. We want to support users’ decision-making before, during, and after payments. That is the new value we believe PayPay Card can create.

The Responsibility That Comes with Data

None of these initiatives can exist without proper governance. Handling data comes with tremendous responsibility. We maintain strict internal standards for how data is managed and continuously review those standards. We also continuously strengthen our security measures to ensure user information is handled appropriately and securely. Only with those foundations in place can we responsibly create new value through data. This is a principle we will never compromise on.

Are You Ready to Help Build What Does Not Yet Exist?

What we are building is still unfinished. That is precisely why we need people who are willing to help create it. Ultimately, the question is whether you want to help shape this future yourself. In the end, that choice defines everything.

At PayPay Card, we are not looking for people who simply execute assigned tasks. We are looking for people who constantly ask, “Is this really the right way?” People who can add their own value to what they create. Frankly speaking, this environment is not suited for those who wait to be told what to do. I have always believed that the future evolution of PayPay Card is not necessarily about remaining a conventional credit card company. We aim to expand experiences around payments and create entirely new forms of value through data. And we intend to make that transformation happen ourselves.

A Message to Future Candidates

Today, the PayPay Group is redefining the payment experience in ways that are only possible because of the scale of our user base and the depth of our data. We are building products that simultaneously drive growth and profitability. Very few environments offer the opportunity to create at this scale.

If you want to change something. If you want to play a direct role in that change. Then this is a place worth challenging yourself. Because it is still unfinished, you still have the opportunity to shape it. That is exactly the kind of person I hope to work with.

*Information such as job openings and employee affiliations is accurate as of the time of the interview.