In an increasingly cashless world, buying a new fall sweater or splitting drinks with friends has been left to e-commerce.
PayPal is a leading platform for both online commerce and peer-to-peer money transactions. The company was a pioneer in the fintech space, launching its first version of an electronic payment system in 1999. Since then, it has acquired several companies, including Venmo, an app that allows users to easily split bills and transfer funds from their banks, in 2012.
As the global economy and tech world continue to evolve, PayPal remains at the forefront of customer-led innovations that help users manage their money safely and efficiently.
Before becoming president and CEO in 2023, Alex Chriss told Newsweek he didn’t fully recognize the impact that PayPal has on a global stage. His goal was to avoid complacency and prepare the company to be at the forefront of the evolving financial industry.
“The opportunity that I saw coming in was, how do we really take this great privilege that our consumers have entrusted with us, [like] trust, safety [and the] security of moving their most critical asset of money and help them with more,” he said.
As the “granddaddy of fintech,” Chriss said PayPal has to leverage the scale and trust that it’s built over the last two decades to disrupt itself and the industry as a whole.
“That’s the culture that I’m trying to bring here – I’m not holding on to decisions that we made a decade ago,” he said. “I’m thinking about helping build a culture that allows us to do what’s right for customers [while] leaning into the future.”
With PayPal, users can send and receive money linked to their bank accounts, pay for goods and services from businesses while earning rewards, buy and sell cryptocurrencies and open a savings account, credit or debit card.
Businesses can use the app for facilitating online checkout, invoicing and setting up recurring payments. PayPal provides 24/7 fraud monitoring, purchase protection and financial encryption to ensure secure money transfers and protect users’ personal and financial data.
Chriss, who previously served as Intuit’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intuit’s Small Business, brought in a new senior leadership team in the last two years to implement a new strategy for the company.
“Leadership is about inspiring a group of individuals to create and achieve extraordinary things,” he said. “To do that, you’ve got to have a big, bold vision, a very clear mission that everybody can rally behind and you’ve got to find the right people [who] are curious [and] are hungry to be able to win.”
A year and a half ago, Chriss introduced a new mission: to “revolutionize commerce globally.” He said he wanted to give his staff permission to think about the disruption that is going to happen to commerce in the next few years.
Suzan Kereere is the president of global markets at PayPal and is responsible for managing client relationships and growth strategies in markets around the world. She joined the company in 2024, previously working at Fiserv, Visa and American Express.
Chriss’ clear vision and commitment to execution have been “a source of inspiration to shape the future of the industry,” Kereere told Newsweek in an email.
“It challenged me to look at PayPal through a new lens, not only as a leader in digital payments, but as a company with the reach, assets and relationships to fundamentally shape the future of commerce,” she added.
Kereere called Chriss’ impact on the company “profound” – from recruiting top talent to lead and upleveling product development to listening to employees, all to ensure that PayPal remains an “employer of choice,” she said. “We’ve fostered a culture of accountability, collaboration and customer focus, which gives us both the permission and the discipline to innovate with purpose. That kind of leadership not only inspires confidence inside the company but also strengthens the trust we have with our customers and partners around the world.”
This shift from the top down has resulted in more than 400 million active accounts and $26.3 billion in payment transactions in 2024, according to investor reports. While PayPal’s reach has grown, so has its profit. The company increased its total payment volume by 10 percent to nearly $1.7 trillion, with a net revenue increase to $31.8 billion.
In addition to dominating the fintech world, PayPal is also a leader in workplace culture, consumer trust and corporate responsibility. The company has been featured on several of Newsweek’s 2025 rankings, including America’s Greatest Workplaces, World’s Most Trustworthy Companies, America’s Most Responsible Companies and America’s Greenest Companies.
PayPal has a strong reputation both internally and externally, according to Newsweek’s rankings data partner Plant-A. On the Greatest Workplaces ranking survey, nine out of ten employees said they aligned with the company’s values and 90 percent of employees also said there is a high level of trust, transparency and respect among employees at all levels.
A similar percentage of employees also agreed that the company is popular and has a positive public image, 12 percentage points above the industry average. PayPal was also rated above the industry average in support for working partners, veterans and women.
“You can feel it across the company. Employees are energized, focused on customers and playing to win,” Kereere said. “That clarity and momentum are showing up in the innovation you see on our roadmap today.”
Product innovation can be made easier when so many of the employees, and their friends and families, interact with PayPal several times throughout their day.
With so many invested users around the world, Chriss said PayPal employees can’t escape their impact. He said customers are “not shy” about giving them feedback, which he considers both a blessing and a curse.
“I could walk through the airport with a PayPal or a Venmo hoodie on, and someone’s going to come up to me and say, ‘I love your product, and I have a suggestion of something to do,'” he said.
Chriss said PayPal is “customer-obsessed” in its approach to communication and research, trying to stay ahead of the latest trends and evolving financial needs of its user base.
For example, PayPal Fastlane is a one-click guest checkout solution that was inspired by an issue that business users were frequently experiencing. Kereere said the company saw that merchants were losing customers because of the PayPal checkout experience, so the company introduced the Fastlane tool, which “instantly recognizes returning shoppers and removes the friction of manual form entry.”
“Fastlane helps merchants reduce cart abandonment and increase completed transactions,” she told Newsweek over email. “The result is a smoother, more trusted checkout experience for consumers and higher conversion rates for businesses.”
With millions of users depending on PayPal to manage their personal and business finances, trust is paramount at PayPal. The company said safety and security are synonymous with the brand, and that’s not something PayPal takes for granted.
“There’s nothing more stressful than money, whether you’re a consumer or small business,” Chriss said. “So we take that responsibility very seriously.”
The biggest challenge for small businesses, Chriss said, is always cash flow.
“Having worked with small businesses for 20 years, they are the underdogs,” he said. “They are the ones that are making our communities thrive and our economy thrive. They’re employing the majority of our employees around the world.”
But in times of economic tumult, he said, “it’s the small businesses that feel it first and feel it the hardest.”
During PayPal’s Investor Day on February 25, 2025, Chriss said his goals are to help small businesses stand out in a crowded marketplace and to transform the company “from being the PayPal that you know and love just online” to being available “everywhere a consumer or a merchant wants to transact.”
This means transitioning from a one-size-fits-all model to a more personalized experience, one that gives customers options to make smarter financial choices and helps merchants retain and recruit new customers.
Chriss told Newsweek that PayPal is leveraging user data to help businesses access more capital and new customers.
With customers, PayPal is also listening to their shifting financial needs. Younger demographics are moving away from credit cards as their primary spending instrument, according to customer research.
“We’re seeing our debit card products really accelerate,” Chriss said.
Another major trend that’s already making an impact on the industry is artificial intelligence. Agentic e-commerce is “only going to get more pervasive,” Chriss said, and AI tools can help with more personalization so users can know which payment method to use.
“They [customers] always have this anxiety that they’re leaving some reward on the table or if they picked something different, it would be a better choice for their personal financial situation,” he said. “So we’re leveraging AI in our smart wallet to help customers make the right choice at the right time for every purchase. And that’s putting more money back in their pocket and helping [them] be smarter when they make those purchases.”
PayPal can then also use customer data, with permission, to enable merchants to “very safety and securely” create a better, more personalized shopping experience.
Launching this fall is PayPal World, a new tool that connects payment systems and digital wallets from around the world on a single platform. The tool allows for seamless transactions across borders and is expected to expand as the company forms more partnerships.
The next five years will bring the most disruptive moments, Chriss said, and that challenge is what excites him. Agentic e-commerce, crypto, omnichannel purchasing and interoperable wallets on a global scale will come together to create a brand new fintech experience for customers and merchants. And PayPal is in a position to disrupt itself.
“We don’t know exactly what the future is going to hold, but the opportunity to create and continue to remove costs and friction from the system, to put more money in the merchants’ pockets, to give customers great rewards, greater personalized experiences, greater breadth of opportunity, I think are opening up over the next few years,” he said.