If I worked for PayPal right now I'd be printing résumés. Stripe recently laid off 300 of their IT people. To paraphrase Petey Greene, I wouldn't trust them to wash my car.
PayPal announced 5k layoffs in May.
Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
201–210 of 333 posts
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that Stripe will shut off paying customers BECAUSE I HAVE SEEN THEM DO IT. That is what first hand knowledge is. You are overindexing on your anecdotal experience to draw conclusions that make no sense. Paypal earns roughly 6x the net revenue of Stripe while processing a similar volume of transactions. Paypal has obviously figured out how to service these businesses profitably, yet for some reason you think…
It's not billions. My assertion is they will throw away processing millions to ensure they can continue to process billions. You'd ignore a pence to pick up a pound.
Paypal earned 30b net revenue in 2025, without any specific numbers, it's a safe bet that high-risk merchants are at least several billion of that total.
However, even if it were only in the hundred millions, there's no reason to throw away millions of dollars. The reason PayPal services these lines of business in the first place is because they make money doing so (since unlike Stripe, PayPal's product isn't subject to the constraints of the card rails).
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#203If paypal goes? wheres the competition? Surely this isnt going to past ftc?
And as much trump friendly the ftc is, theres still the state attornies like we see with the paramount deal
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#204Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.
Paying with Paypal is as easy as logging in. With Wero/iDeal you always need a phone or a code. People trust PayPal more too.
Logging into PayPal is easy except on one of those days when it is not.. and nothing can fix it other than waiting ~24h.
With a proper bank account, strong authentication with some dongle or code generator means if I have it, I can depend on being able to pay. No regard for the number of bots currently pestering them.
With PayPal trying to guess whether its me, maybe I can pay. Maybe I'll get a captcha loop. Maybe there will be a nondescript error message beginning with "Oops". Or maybe the error message will ask to call.. a rep that is not trained and/or authorized to do anything other than password resets. Which is not exactly a useful solution for account lockouts unrelated to the correctly entered, unique password.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.
What’s stopping a new competitor to come in apart from regulations? You would expect someone already trying that given how profitable it is
Yea, I think you have this one backward? it's lack of regulation that allows Mastercard and Visa to say "if you do try to use some other payment process you can't use us". Since MC and Visa own all of it, no business can take that hit to their customer base
Some other countries don't have this issue for various reasons.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#206Extremely weak bid, no? PayPal was worth 5x this a few years ago... Even pre-pandemic it was worth far more. Hell, just a year ago it was valued at ~$80 share. $60.50 per share would value them at just 11x their current earnings. I get PayPal isn't exactly a growth company anymore, but I'm not sure I understand why shareholders would agree to this offer?
Honey lawsuits still might be a feared liability?
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#207Paypal was worth near $50 when it IPO again in 2015, and it is still worth $50B today? And this isn't some inflated market cap either, apart from 2021 and 2022 they have been making $5B+ Net income in the past 6 years. I would love to dive into how Paypal makes money because that is an order of magnitude bigger than I thought. There must be some market in which Paypal is popular and culturally accepted as by default…
Competition is fierce and there's only so much innovation you can do as a payment service provider
For starters, they could have made at least every website related to customer-facing payment flow as fast as stripe managed to deliver pretty much right from the start.
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#208I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more? I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was imp…
> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.
Is it? I can imagine scenarios where they're better off accepting a duopoly if it allows the profit margin to be 3x higher
Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#209Re: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Interne…
what's the problem with zelle? it works in my bank app, it's fast, no fees, it's really easy to use
1. Bank apps are terrible, slow, and poorly organized, because banks. They suck at software. Venmo and Cashapp are good at software.
2. (Insert healthy amount of distrust of anything the banks all want, because there's zero chance it's in consumers' best interest)
3. We don't control anything, Zelle does. I have 5 bank accounts (multiple banks). I have one cell phone number, and of COURSE Zelle, like the banks that run it, insists on using cell phone numbers as basically their primary key and only identifier. When someone pays me by putting in my number, where will the money go? F--k if I know!