Dive Brief:

• PayPal Holdings will focus on buttressing its branded checkout services this year, redoubling efforts to assist its biggest merchants in rolling out features that provide the best experience possible for consumers, the company’s chief financial and operating officer, Jamie Miller, said during an investor conference Tuesday.
• The company “had a lot of learnings,” Miller said at the Wolfe Research Fintech Forum. She noted a deceleration for its main PayPal branded checkout services in the second half of last year.
• “What we really learned was we've been very focused on scaling across the whole portfolio,” Miller said. “We need to take a much more targeted approach to be able to scale that, and that's really part of our pivot.”

Dive Insight:

While Miller didn’t discuss news reports last month suggesting the company may be sold, either in whole or parts, she talked about how PayPal remains powerful as an integrated platform, including its peer-to-peer unit Venmo. “I really believe that the most important way to drive value creation is to focus on organic growth, and that's exactly how we think about the integration, across processing with Venmo and branded checkout,” she said. 

A number of possible acquirers have been mentioned in media reports, including fintechs such as Stripe and banks like JPMorgan Chase.

Miller was elevated briefly to interim CEO last month after PayPal said that Alex Chriss was exiting the chief executive post. At the same time, the company appointed board member Enrique Lores, formerly CEO of the technology company HP, to take the PayPal CEO job, effective this month. 

“Focus and execution,” will be key marching orders for the company this year as Lores takes over, Miller predicted. She noted that Lores was out meeting with investors this week, and that he met with analysts at Wolfe Monday. His faster decision-making and ability to prioritize will be key attributes he brings to the company, she said.

PayPal’s leadership change last month came as the company announced fourth-quarter earnings that underperformed the expectations of analysts and investors. Slow merchant adoption of the digital payment pioneer’s latest technology and lagging growth of its legacy checkout services stymied growth plans.

Chriss had been in the top post at PayPal for less than three years, unfurling ambitious plans to jump-start growth at the San Jose, California-based company. It proved a significant challenge, as it had been for his predecessor, Dan Schulman, who left the job in 2023.