Paypal CFO Joining Walmart as CFO All You Need to Know About Both Companies
Paypal CFO Joining Walmart as CFO All You Need to Know About Both Companies
The analogy I use for this move is John Donahoe joining Nike. What is the former CEO of eBay, a technology company and marketplace doing running a shoe company?
The simple answer is that the future is digital, and the business needed more digital operators who understood that direct to consumer is the future.
Since the beginning of retail, financial products have multiplied and that trend has only accelerated with the "financialization" of Direct to Consumer eCommerce in the past 5 years.
Walmart's biggest profit dollar potential in the next 10 years is not selling goods that it manufactures or resells. It's in services -- financial, advertising, and health. Logistics services will be an service to offer of course, but not as important as these other options. Put another way, Walmart doesn't need more financial analysts who understand real estate, inventory financing, or supplier terms negotiation. They already got that covered.
When you think about innovation, you often think about doing something totally new, in a totally new way. Well, that is expensive to do. Walmart has already demonstrated it can continue to grow by doing things many other companies are doing, in similar ways, but at greater scale.
That greater scale gives them significant advantages over the competitors that detractors say they are "copying" from and "not being innovative."
Well, that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
On the other side of the coin, Paypal has run out of ideas and out of steam. For how smug the Paypal team was about leaving eBay and throwing shade on eBay's growth rate, they certainly haven't done anything interesting since that time.
Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba should smell blood in the water. Similar to logistics, the winner in payments will eventually be the company that controls the consumer.
Stripe, for all its efforts and scale, does not have a consumer brand. It would be extremely tricky for that to change, given how high-profile some of their customers are and their ambitions (see: Shop Pay).
Affirm is the biggest beneficiary of Paypal's missteps, as Max Levchin is a payment innovator and Paypal co-Founder.
Think he doesn't know their playbook?
