PayPal's new CEO says slow decisions held the company back. He plans to fix that and put more focus on consumer money features, including Venmo.
PayPal's new chief executive says the company has been too slow, and he is trying to speed it up. Enrique Lores said Monday that too many layers of management bogged down decisions under prior leadership. He spoke at the Money 20/20 financial technology conference in Las Vegas.
Lores became CEO on March 1 after Alex Chriss left. He had been PayPal's chairman. He said the company must "simplify how we work" and cut management layers. He also said PayPal has made it clearer who decides what and who is accountable. In his words, accountability is one of the most important ways to improve performance.
Lores said PayPal's attention had been tilted toward merchants, meaning the businesses that sell through it. The company now wants to put more into consumers. That includes buy now pay later, personal banking and Venmo payments. He said Venmo and Braintree, PayPal's payment processing system, were not getting enough attention or investment, and that has changed.
He also said PayPal's most engaged customers want a broader set of financial services from it. Checkout is not going away, he said. The new services will sit alongside it.
PayPal's stock has fallen about 76% over the past five years. The company has started cutting jobs but has not said how many. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported in May that PayPal aims to cut about 20% of its global workforce, citing people familiar with the plans. That figure is not confirmed by the company.
Bloomberg also reported that PayPal looked at a possible sale after Stripe and the private equity firm Advent International made a bid in July. The suitors reportedly dropped the effort the next month. Lores did not discuss the sale talks or the size of the job cuts on Monday.
One bet is on agentic commerce. That means shopping done for you by a personal AI assistant. Lores said trust will matter even more in that world, and PayPal wants to be the trusted name. He was realistic about timing. He expects little buying through agents in 2026 or 2027, and no meaningful sales volume until 2028. PayPal is building infrastructure and partnerships now.
Specific new products, launch dates and the scale of the changes for merchants were not given in his remarks.
PayPal is shifting toward consumer money services and faster decisions, but the details, dates and job cut numbers are still unclear.
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