Stripe and Advent International have offered $60.50 a share for PayPal, a bid that values the payments company at more than $53bn and is backed by about $50bn in financing commitments from banks, according to Reuters.
The buyers will have equal shares in the business and, unusually for a proposal with a private company attached, they say they will not split it.
The offer came in earlier this month and follows an initial approach in early April, and PayPal has not responded at all.
Advent is no stranger to this corner of the market: it took Canadian processor Nuvei private in a $6.3bn deal in 2024, and Nuvei is currently buying Payoneer for $2.75bn with a clear promise to build a rival to Stripe.
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If PayPal’s bid comes, Advent will be sponsoring both sides of that battle.
$60.50 works out to about 28% above Tuesday’s close of about $47. Placed against the stock price, the open no.
Compared to the history of PayPal, charities: the company’s market value reached a peak close to $360bn in 2021, touched almost $36bn earlier this year, and has fallen by more than 40% in the last 12 months.
PayPal’s decline has been slow and predictable. It was invented in the late 1990s, and for ten years the default way to pay a stranger online, has watched Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a generation of fintech competitors take the trend away.
The company also has six months to resume leadership. In February, the board ousted CEO Alex Chriss, saying the pace of change and performance under him had not met expectations, and issued a 2026 profit forecast so far below Wall Street that the shares had fallen 19% over the period. Enrique Lores, until then HP’s chief executive, took the job on March 1.
Evercore ISI analysts wrote at the time that it was an open question whether the incoming chief executive would make it “bring in a formidable payments team to try another multi-year dividend or look to start reviewing strategic asset options”. Five months later, another person has suggested a second option on his behalf.
Lores moved quickly. In April he split PayPal into three units, including checkout, consumer financial services and Venmo, as well as payments and crypto.
In May he launched a plan to use AI to strip layers of duplicate jobs from the organization, worth about $1.5bn in savings over two to three years, all earmarked for reinvestment.
It seems to work on the edges. First-quarter revenue rose 7% to $8.35bn against a consensus of $8.05bn, and net payments grew 8% on a currency basis to around $464bn.
The tender went to the company that stopped falling rather than the one that started to climb.
The stripe comes at it from the other side. It was valued at $159bn in February’s tender for employees and shareholders, more than 70% more than the same auction last year, and contemplated payments of $1.9tn by 2025, up 34%.
It is privately held, incorporated in San Francisco and Dublin, and its founder John Collison has argued that agent trading will reinvent online shopping directly.
Payments have been included in that thesis for a long time. Global Payments agreed to spin off Worldpay off FIS and GTCR for $24.25bn last year, Mastercard paid up to $1.8bn for BVNK, and Arwallex raised $11bn last month on the idea that the software will soon do so.
Having PayPal could give Stripe one thing it doesn’t have in that cash it can quickly build, which is the consumer brand people already trust with a card number.
Stripe and Advent want to continue negotiations in the coming weeks, and want a deal by the end of the month. PayPal, Stripe, and Advent all declined to comment. There is no guarantee that any of it will produce a transaction.
