PayPal Holdings was slow to make decisions under its prior leadership, with too many management layers bogging down the pace of execution, Chief Executive Enrique Lores said Monday during a discussion at an industry conference.
The digital payments company needs to “simplify how we work, remove (and) accelerate decision makers, reduce management layers, and become a more agile company,” Lores said on stage during a conversation about his turnaround plans for PayPal at the annual Money 20/20 financial technology conference.
“We have clarified how decisions need to be made and clarified accountability,” said Lores, who was PayPal’s chairman before assuming the CEO role on March 1 after Alex Chriss exited. “And having been in business for a long time, I know accountability is one of the most important things to improve performance.”
Lores offered a brief summary of some of PayPal’s past faults during the discussion, explaining his strategy for the company’s turnaround. He spoke with Karen Webster, the chief executive of PYMNTS, a business-to-business publisher.
PayPal’s Venmo peer-to-peer fund transfer service and the Braintree processing system “were not getting enough attention, were not getting enough investment, and we have changed that,” Lores said.
As part of the turnaround, the company has begun cutting jobs, but has not specified the size of the reductions envisioned under Lores’ three-year plan. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported in May that PayPal aims to reduce its global workforce by about 20% over the restructuring period, citing people familiar with the plans.
San Jose, California-based PayPal also reportedly assessed a potential sale of the business to digital processing peer Stripe and private equity firm Advent International after they made a bid for the company in July. But the suitors abandoned that effort the following month, Bloomberg reported.
Lores did not discuss the sale discussions or the scope of job cuts during his remarks Monday on the second day of the event in Las Vegas
Under Lores, PayPal is betting that a focus on consumer financial services, such as buy now pay later, personal banking and Venmo payments will spark growth and lift its laggard stock price, which has declined about 76% over the past five years.
“The attention of the company has been much more in the merchant side than in the consumer side,” he said. “And we are revitalizing what we do for consumers, understanding better what our consumers do, and shaping our portfolio for them.”
PayPal also intends to leverage its brand trust with merchants and consumers to capitalize on the expected boom of agentic commerce transactions conducted with consumers’ personal agents, he said.
“Trust was very important when e-commerce started,” Lores said, referencing the company’s roots as an early digital player. “It’s going to be even more important in an agentic world, and that’s the position that we need to occupy.”
PayPal doesn’t expect any meaningful sales volumes from agentic commerce until 2028, Lores said, although the company is investing in infrastructure and partnerships to prepare for that growth. “If we are realistic, the amount of commerce that is done through agents in ‘26, or that will be done in ‘27, is going to be relatively small,” he said.
PayPal has learned that its most engaged and valuable customers “really would like us to offer a broader portfolio of financial services,” the CEO said.
PayPal’s push into more consumer finance “doesn't mean that we are going to be abandoning checkout,” he said. “Checkout will continue to be very relevant, but we have complemented it with an additional portfolio of services.”
PayPal is also using the turnaround effort as an opportunity to modernize its internal technology stack, with artificial intelligence helping to accelerate that process, Lores said. “We can do in the next 18 months things that in the past would have taken us three or four years,” he said.