- Alex Chriss will become the new CEO of PayPal on September 27.
- Current CEO Dan Schulman announced in February he would retire at the end of 2023.
- Chriss will come from Intuit, where he is the EVP of small business and self-employed group.
PayPal has found its new CEO.
Alex Chriss, the executive vice president of small business and self-employed group at Intuit, has been tapped to lead PayPal, the firm announced Monday. He will take on the role and join the board on September 27.
The move comes as current PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced on February 9 that he will retire at the end of the year. Schulman, who has been running the company since 2014, led PayPal through some of its best years fueled by digital payments soared during the pandemic. Total payment volume grew five-fold between 2015 and 2022 to $1.36 trillion, according to the company. In the same timeframe, PayPal revenues about tripled to $27.5 billion in 2022.
Chriss’ appointment comes at an important time for PayPal. Shares of PayPal fell about 60% in 2022 amid a broader slump in the fintech market.
The company has been cutting costs, with PayPal estimating it could save as much as $1.3 billion this year. The payments giant laid off roughly 2,000 employees in January, giving PayPal a $600 million boost. Meanwhile, activist investor Elliott Management took a stake in PayPal worth more than $2 billion in July 2022.
Chriss has spent the past 19 years at Intuit, where he was most recently in charge of an 8,000-person division delivering QuickBooks and Mailchimp to Intuit’s small and medium-sized business customers, according to his LinkedIn. His team enabled millions of customers to run their businesses online, handling everything from marketing to customer analytics, paying employees, and accessing capital.
In 2021, he led Intuit’s successful $12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp, significantly expanding the capacity of Intuit’s platform and its customer base.
“With his depth of experience in product development, his passion for serving customers and his longstanding commitment to empowering and enabling small businesses, and his proven track record of developing and inspiring his team, Alex is the perfect leader to take PayPal forward and accelerate the company’s growth opportunities,” said John Donahoe, chair of the PayPal Board of Directors.
As recently as August 2, PayPal’s search for Schulman’s successor was not finalized.
“We are in the very final stages of the process with several outstanding candidates, all of whom are highly qualified and excited to lead PayPal as we go into our next chapter of growth,” Schulman said during the company’s second-quarter earnings. Schulman will continue to serve on PayPal’s board of directors until its next annual meeting of stockholders in May 2024.
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