PayPal

PayPal is one of the world's largest online payments platforms, originally founded in 1998 and acquired by eBay in 2002 before spinning off as an independent public company in 2015. Headquartered in San Jose, California, PayPal operates in more than 200 markets and handles hundreds of billions of dollars in payment volume annually. Its product suite includes the PayPal wallet, Venmo (peer-to-peer payments in the US), Braintree (merchant payments), and Xoom (international remittances).

The company has been under sustained competitive pressure from Apple Pay, Google Pay, and buy-now-pay-later providers, as well as from banks rebuilding their own digital payment offerings. CEO transitions have been frequent: Dan Schulman led the post-eBay spin-off era, succeeded by Alex Chriss in 2023, before Enrique Lores took the role on 1 March 2026. Each leadership transition has come with a fresh round of restructuring.

PayPal's workforce has fluctuated dramatically across the post-pandemic cycle, with significant cuts in 2023 and again in 2026 as the company attempts to streamline operations around AI-assisted fraud detection, customer service, and payment routing while competing on margin against lower-cost fintech rivals.

Under new CEO Enrique Lores, PayPal cut approximately 4,760 jobs across multiple tranches in May 2026. The phased approach — breaking the reduction into batches below the threshold that triggers the US WARN Act's 60-day advance-notice requirement — was cited by analysts as a deliberate compliance strategy.

The approach was held up as an example of how large employers can conduct AI-driven workforce reductions while minimising legal exposure and public visibility, by staying narrowly below the site-specific thresholds that trigger mandatory worker notification. It drew criticism from labour advocates as WARN Act evasion through deliberate structuring.