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That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is a measure of the concentration of a market based on the market-share of the firms participating in it. Very much like the Simpson's index that tells you the probability of two organisms in a place being of the same type when randomly drawn.

It's just \sum_i^n h_{i}^2 sum of squares of market-share.

Enjoyed that. Thanks for the discovery.

If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.

At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now
Seeing as payment processing is already a highly regulated industry, I hope that the anti-trust issue is simply ignored, as a consumer. I don't really want to maintain six different payment processor accounts, or have thoughts about which payment processor I prefer. I just want there to be one that everyone uses and that doesn't get in the way. Some countries have a single government-controlled online payment processor, and that seems to work. The ideal American way might be to have a single technically-private-sector highly-regulated one.
With all these new banking methods, also "Hero" more recently, I really don't know where this new "Numerical Euro" stuff from the ECB is going
Gosh, with such efficiency of operations consumers will win because pricing of their services will be more efficient! Todays Feds will try selling that story.
The future is direct payments without middlemen.

So consolidation of these legacy players is not unexpected - their revenue whilst sizeable is going to continually decrease every year as people use cards less (Many countries have/are rolling out their domestic app2app or bank2retailer payment system).

This makes stripe more valuable. No company on the web wants to manage dozens of local payment methods with slightly different rules and possible local bank account requirements.

Stripe is a much stronger company when they're able to aggregate a large number of small payment networks rather than just relying on Visa/MC.

No worries, lobbyist are working day and night to prevent anything like what Brasil has with PIX ever making it.
PayPal user for 20+ years and it is time to end that dross
Not good. Stripe makes restrictions that PayPal allows (cannabis adjacent, adult adjacent) that Stripe blocks. Many vendors will be negatively impacted by Stripes morality police and selective application of their policies.
I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?

I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.

Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.

It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.

Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.
What I find weird about this is that JohnC has been saying for decades that large mergers are pretty bad for both companies. You spend 2,3 years in limbo, figuring out what in the world to do with the other large organization. When Stripe makes acquisitions it's historically been small companies, doing things Stripe isn't doing. It's the kind of situation where pc is unlikely to speak publicly here, but I sure would love to understand what the plan is, if just as a shareholder.
If I worked for PayPal right now I'd be printing résumés. Stripe recently laid off 300 of their IT people. To paraphrase Petey Greene, I wouldn't trust them to wash my car.
I'm not sure how this is a good thing. There are already very limited options to accept payments online, consolidating two of the major ones is not a great thing.
I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.

Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.

What I find interesting about this isn’t acquiring the flow from PayPal but the fact that PayPal has a bank charter and stripe doesn’t (not a real one, all that Georgia bank stuff is shenanigans). Properly structured this gives stripe a lot of interesting opportunities that they’ve had to delegate to partners and that dilutes not just their margins in the fee stack but restricts the types of transactions and merchants they can host, beyond the minimal regulatory constraint.

The next move would be to offer a stripe managed card network that captures the full MDR interchange fee stack, from issuance to processing to network to bank. They could offer deep discounts to merchants hosting their accounts on their bank issuing cards through them and processing through them by cutting out every middle man. It would instantly become the third largest network in terms of points of sale behind visa and Mastercard. They could further carve out heavy rewards for customers through direct relationships with airlines, hotels, and merchants through their existing issuer services. They would become the first fully integrated vertical in payments, and the efficiency that would give them in fees would allow them to crush the hodge podge payment stacks out there that exist. I’d wager in five years they would dominate the market.

Do the processing fees really add up? Can't fathom that Stripe is big enough to buy PayPal, but maybe I'm just 10 years behind on this industry.
Trying to create a monopoly before the lack of antitrust enforcement window closes.
In some ways, I would rather Stripe have the market power here to negotiate against Visa & Mastercard than Visa/Mastercard holding the reigns over a fragmented digital ecosystem.
Extremely weak bid, no?

PayPal was worth 5x this a few years ago... Even pre-pandemic it was worth far more. Hell, just a year ago it was valued at ~$80 share.

$60.50 per share would value them at just 11x their current earnings. I get PayPal isn't exactly a growth company anymore, but I'm not sure I understand why shareholders would agree to this offer?

I will support this idea if they allow changing your PayPal handle! When they first introduced that feature, PayPal made it seem more frivolous than a username. In fact I don't even think they called it a username at the time. I decided to use it for a side project that didn't work out, then came to discover that the handle had become my permanent username for my personal account with no way to change it whatsoever. If you call your small ballpoint pen business @penisland but realize the lack of wisdom behind that handle, you're stuck with it for life. Paypal does not care and will not provide you with support.

I'm no longer a fan of Stripe, but if they fix that one issue I will happily use PayPal again.

Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.
My worry is that fees might go through the roof without any other options
Not great tbh.

The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.

The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.

But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.

Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?

Reading about Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions is funny. X uses Stripe, but Stripe on X doesn't accept my Bybit stablecoin cryptocard for a Pro subscription, ads, or boost purchases.
Paypal was worth near $50 when it IPO again in 2015, and it is still worth $50B today?

And this isn't some inflated market cap either, apart from 2021 and 2022 they have been making $5B+ Net income in the past 6 years. I would love to dive into how Paypal makes money because that is an order of magnitude bigger than I thought. There must be some market in which Paypal is popular and culturally accepted as by default payment.

Which also makes me want to rethink how much Apple Pay is worth if it was a separate business.

If paypal goes? wheres the competition? Surely this isnt going to past ftc?

And as much trump friendly the ftc is, theres still the state attornies like we see with the paramount deal

This would be amazing! Its such a pain having to set up two payment solutions as a merchant and as a buyer it would be great if I could use my paypal credit on whatever purchase I want. Consumers want paypal and merchant want stripe. I really want this to happen.
So... I got banned from PayPal (with no explanation) and Stripe closed my account (with no recourse for 'crowdfunding' after linking to Ko-Fi).

Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.

PayPal owns Venmo, though.
Stripe won't be holding a monopoly for long now that Airwallex is entering the US market. Healthy competition is always welcome.
Mark the date.

If this passes antitrust review (unlikely imo), Stripe is about to be destroyed by a culture virus that they *paid* for.

Why wait? Let’s just jump straight to “StripeX” and get it over with.
I really do not grasp business when PayPal is somehow worth over $50 Billion

It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank

Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?

Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?

they should kill paypal
how things have changed! the grand daddy is being acquired!
Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?
thrilled that stripe is buying paypal
I mean less competition is probably not good for anyone.
lmao "if you can't compete, you buy your competition"

This should be blocked, and Stripe should be investigated for trying to build a monopoly

Another geek darling on the path to a dangerous monopoly?

Hello Cloudflare btw.

that’s great