Fast forward to 2026: PayPal just fired its CEO, the stock is sitting at its lowest level since 2017 (sub-$44), and the company is trading at ~7.4x forward earnings.
A few years ago, the narrative was that PayPal was a long-term fintech winner with strong leadership and a durable moat. That did not age well.
What happened?
I was curious so read into it.
It seems like they never figured out how to do the seamless checkout that Google wallet and Apple Pay provide and also seem to being out maneuvered by Stripe too.
I always thought their big play was being another payment platform outside of Visa and Mastercard, but maybe they never leveraged that the way I thought they should.
Don’t they own venmo though? The QR Code payment is super quick and convenient.
You are right that they also own venmo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venmo.
So yeah, not sure how they haven’t been able to monetize that.
They monetized it as a data farm instead of a financial service, which was fine when literally everyone isn’t running a data farm
Pretty sure block owns Venmo, who also owns square.Block owns cash app, not Venmo.
In addition to the below comments, PayPal is also one of the few major platforms who add a fee for Chargebacks which leads to frauds where users could send money to a YouTuber, Gamedev, or Streamer via a paypal link, let’s say $1, and then take the money back, resulting in a $15 loss to said Streamer.
There were a couple of high profile cases of this a while back where PayPal saw this happen and chose not to settle the fees, because it was within their terms to charge them regardless of the cause.
Turns out that fucking over your customers is not the best business model. Who knew?
Perhaps, like a lot of these companies really pushing microloans for small purchases, people stopped paying them.
