Dan Schulman, PayPal’s CEO for almost a decade, Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin through the company’s digital wallets, and PayPal, which also owns Venmo, recently unveiled its own stablecoin.
“If you’re a large payments company, of course you’re going to do something in crypto,” Harshita Rawat, a senior research analyst at AB Bernstein, told Fortune. However, she said that PayPal’s crypto push is more about “optionality,” or bets that may or may not yield returns. “At this point, it’s not very core to the business.”
‘Change was needed’
While PayPal has been the standard-bearer for digital payments since its founding in 1998, the company has recently fought to keep up with a new crop of competitors.
There’s Block, the payments company founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Apple has gained market share through its recent suite of financial products. And even Google has tried to push its way into online payments. “The biggest issue PayPal faces today is that they have come under competitive pressure in their core branded-checkout business,” Trevor Williams, a fintech analyst at Jefferies, told Fortune.
Moreover, ever since Schulman announced his retirement, the CEO succession “has been a key overhang over PayPal’s stock,” Rawat of AB Bernstein told Fortune.
However, among investors, according to analysts Rawat and Williams, there may have been a collective sigh of relief on Monday when PayPal anointed Chriss as Schulman’s heir apparent. Although Chriss is unknown to many payments analysts, PayPal will benefit from an external candidate injecting new life into the company, Rawat and Williams said.
“Change was needed,” Williams added. “Having a fresh face is what investors were looking for.”
Update, Aug. 15, 2023: This article has been updated with more information about Chriss’s crypto wallet.
