How Alex Chriss has changed PayPal's 'focus'

• Key insights: PayPal CEO Alex Chriss has invested in AI and digital assets to boost the company's payment strategy.  
• What's at stake: PayPal's competitors include other payment firms, card networks and banks.
• Forward look: The company plans on expanding its digital wallet and multichannel technology in the next year. 

Alex Chriss knew he was taking over a large company when he arrived at PayPal in late 2023 to become its CEO. It immediately became apparent just how large. 

"I probably underappreciated just how global the PayPal brand is," Chriss told American Banker. PayPal operates in more than 200 countries with in excess of 430 million active consumers and 35 million merchants, and is on pace to pass $2 trillion in payments volume in 2025.

In the two years since taking the company's top job, Chriss has restructured PayPal's strategy to take advantage of its global reach, correcting what he called an "unclear focus" during a slump that impacted the entire fintech industry following the COVID-19 pandemic. Chriss' changes included de-emphasizing nonpayment business lines such as logistics and doubling down on using PayPal's vast scale to power new forms of artificial intelligence, blockchain and its digital wallet.     

Chriss, who was born in 1977, joined PayPal in 2023 after holding various roles at Intuit over 20 years, including a role in Intuit's executive leadership team as executive vice president and general manager of Intuit's Small Business and Self-Employed Group, engaging with clients similar to PayPal's. He also served as senior vice president and chief product officer of Intuit's Small Business organization, managing QuickBooks products, including payroll and payments platform segments.

"Whenever or wherever I introduce myself, I run into people who have had some interaction with PayPal. I don't take that for granted," Chriss said. 

Change agent

PayPal is betting on agentic AI to support an "omnichannel" payment strategy that includes in-store shopping and payments in addition to its traditional e-commerce focus. Recent launches include Agentic Commerce Services, which includes payment support, order management and connections between merchants and product data, fulfillment and AI-powered checkout. 

"Agentic commerce is the next phase," Chriss said. "We're making sure an [AI] agent can make payments, figure out where they are and find out what store is down the street that has what they want. Then make their purchases." Agentic commerce refers to using AI agents to aid store or web searches, shopping or payments with little or no human intervention. Banks and payment companies have been drawn to agentic AI given its potential to improve the user experience for consumers and shorten workloads for merchants.

In late November, PayPal enabled its merchants to become discoverable within Perplexity, giving consumers the ability to checkout in chat, moving from research to purchase by using PayPal's identity verification. 

PayPal first announced its partnership with Perplexity earlier this year, with Perplexity adding PayPal as a commerce portal for AI-driven retail. Perplexity users browse merchant catalogs and checkout in real time. Merchants at launch include Abercrombie & Fitch, Ashley Furniture, Fabletics, Adorama and NewEgg. PayPal has also partnered with Mastercard and OpenAI to make AI-powered payments available to more consumers and merchants.  

"Agentic commerce won't take over huge chunks of commerce right away, but there is a huge opportunity," Chriss said. 

PayPal's OpenAI partnership and launch of its agentic commerce services helps "turn the narrative on relative positioning within agentic, where investors had broadly viewed PayPal as disadvantaged on a relative basis," analysts at Jefferies said in a research note, noting PayPal's partnerships in generative and agentic AI will give it an advantage.

"Inclusion in ChatGPT's Instant Checkout will make PayPal's branded wallet available as a payment method within Instant Checkout (for merchants who opt-in)," Jeffries analysts said. 

The biggest disruption in shopping is agentic payments, according to payments consultant Richard Crone, adding "it's unfolding before the buy button." This means agentic payments are happening inside large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and agentic commerce platforms like Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. 

Google's Gemini 3 agentic AI program, a PayPal partner, is growing at about a 40% compound annual growth rate, but its true competitive edge lies in deploying about 7 billion agentic parameters, according to Crone's consulting company. These agentic parameters are "adaptive weights that continuously refine buyer intent, improve reasoning, and increase off-site sales conversions," he said.

The challenge is to trigger a payment with a "green path" through botblockers that hinder real-time pricing, inventory management and SKU-level data inside product detail pages, or PDPs, Crone said. "No PDP access means no card, no credential and no checkout, and thus no payment," Crone said, adding Google, Amazon and PayPal (through its partnership with Google) have agentic-scale access to PDP. "PayPal's partnership with Google gives Alex Chriss a direct ride on Gemini's growth and agentic dominance," Crone said. 

Crypto and wallets

PayPal competes with payment technology firms such as Block and Stripe; provides an alternative to Visa, Mastercard and other card networks; and is also a rival to banks through its mix of merchant services, consumer payments and merchant credit. 

PayPal is the most popular online payment company, with revenue from all PayPal services (including transactions) totaling $31.8 billion in 2024, up 6.70% year over year with a net income of $4.15 billion, according to research from Capital One. PayPal has about 44% of the U.S. digital payments market, according to Capital One, which places it ahead of Stripe at 21%, Shopify at 14% and a mix of other companies taking up the rest.

To battle in the competitive payment industry, Chriss will look to expand PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin in the new year while scaling the company's digital wallet.

A growing number of firms have partnered with PayPal to scale access for PYUSD, and PayPal and Venmo have long supported investments and trading cryptocurrency. 

"We're seeing more people hold crypto than using it to make payments," Chriss said. "That will take time to ramp up." 

There is traction for stablecoins for cross-border and B2B payments, he said. "We're making headway particularly in geographies that have inflationary pressures. Stablecoins pegged to U.S. dollars are valuable there," Chriss said. 

Another initiative, PayPal World, is designed to advance PayPal's vision under Chriss, who is using a mix of partners and collaboration to boost its expanding portfolio of artificial intelligence-powered payment applications. The deployments made PayPal and its Venmo P2P app interoperable for the first time. The products were distinct for more than a dozen years, dating to legacy technology from Braintree, a technology company that powered Venmo, which PayPal acquired in the early 2010s. 

"We have owned and operated PayPal and Venmo separately and that was not the ideal experience for consumers," Chriss said. "We have lots of opportunities for PayPal and Venmo users to interact with each other. Every PayPal merchant will be able to use Venmo as their purchase wallet."

The strategy is an effort to boost branded checkout and international payments, two areas that PayPal hopes will drive its growth in the future. 

"We want PayPal to be a place where consumers can use us everywhere every time. To meet customers where they are …whether it's agentic commerce or crypto or interoperable mobile wallets," Chriss said. 

PayPal is also focused on expanding its digital wallet, which recently launched in Germany. PayPal's wallet will debut in other markets over the next few months, according to Chriss.

"Every region in the world has evolved toward a digital wallet," Chriss said. "It's becoming the standard for how people want to manage their money." Widespread adoption of stablecoins issued by banks and nonbank specialists and used in lieu of traditional retail, P2P, interbank, and B2B payment systems would fairly be characterized as disruptive, according to Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

"That's a heavy lift in the U.S. where reigning digital payment systems have network critical mass, work well, and are habit," Grover said. 

PayPal's in a great position to have a go at it, Grover said, by offering easy access and use of its own stablecoin to hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants, and making it usable across as many blockchains as possible. 

On the AI front, genuinely agentic AI authorized and acting on consumers' and/or merchants' behalf would be disruptive, according to Grover. 

"Here too PayPal is taking a run at it," he said. "Agentic AI is potentially transformative. How soon people are willing to authorize an AI agent to operate on their behalf and how soon the legal and regulatory structure supports that, remains to be seen."