PayPal Holdings has appointed a new board member who has experience squarely in the digital payment company’s wheelhouse.
Last week, the digital pioneer named Alyssa Henry, a former CEO of the merchant services company Square, to its board, according to a March 25 press release.
The San Jose, California-based company is doing so as another board member, Gail McGovern, this month decided not to seek re-election at PayPal’s annual meeting, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The annual meeting is scheduled for May 19.
Henry will bring fresh perspective to the company just as it’s coming under new leadership from CEO Enrique Lores, a former HP CEO who took the top post this month. Lores, who was previously the PayPal board chairman, succeeded Alex Chriss, who exited abruptly in February, just as PayPal released lower-than-expected revenue growth for the final quarter of 2025.
That turn of events has set off some speculation as to whether PayPal may be sold, or sell some assets, with reports about possible suitors in the fintech and banking worlds. The company has declined to comment on that speculation.
As the company sets a new course, taking a more targeted approach to scaling the business, Henry’s experience will be suited to the task. Aside from leading the merchant services business Square for about nine months, she worked at that company for nearly a decade, from May 2014 to October 2023, taking the top post in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. (While she was there, in late 2021, Square changed its parent company name to Block, maintaining the Square name for its merchant services business.)
In addition to providing Square’s trademark white square dongle that lets mobile merchants accept payments, the parent company Block operates the digital wallet services business Cash App as well as offering buy now, pay later services through Afterpay, which it acquired in 2021 for about $29 billion.
Block is one of the rare companies, like PayPal, that sits on both sides of the payments equation, enabling transactions for merchants on the retail front, and also equipping consumers to make digital payments on the purchasing front.
Before he left the company, Chriss had been trying use that unique position to carve out a new path for growth at PayPal at the intersection of digital commerce.
Prior to joining Square, Henry was a top manager at the online retail juggernaut Amazon, another company that has innovated in the payments arena. She was on that company’s web services side of the business for most of the eight years she was there, from 2006 to 2014.
A contingent of PayPal’s board has been in place for more than a decade, when PayPal began the process of being spun off from its former digital marketplace owner eBay. Before Chriss, those board members also saw former CEO Dan Schulman struggle to jump-start growth, after a burst of activity during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed.
PayPal appointed two new directors to the board last year for 12 members currently, including five that have track records reaching back to 2015. The company plans to reduce the size of the board to 11 members “immediately before” the annual meeting, just as McGovern is stepping off, according to the SEC filing.
Lores is counting on Henry’s experience to bring a positive influence to the company’s performance. “Her expertise in software-driven merchant solutions, omnichannel payments, and global platform expansion will be invaluable as we strengthen our position as a strategic payments partner to merchants and consumers worldwide,” he said in the release.
