PayPal Completely Changing Leadership, Priorities, and Pace of Innovation

But other than that, everything was great before - right? Right?

PayPal's CEO Alex Chriss, realizing he did not shock the world in January, is continuing to focus on a reboot of the company required to get the company back on the right track.

Here are a few choice quotes from this month's conversations with investors from BofA and RBC:

"When I came in, there were probably three things that I really wanted to focus on in the first few months. The first was ensuring that we had a world-class team. As you noticed, I've changed out most of the leadership team"

- Almost entirely wrong team, check.

"The second is really focus and prioritization. As you've probably heard me talk in the past, I think we were doing too many things"

- Working on the wrong things, check.

"There's lots of opportunity there for us to continue to fill in the gaps of innovation that we've been letting customers down on that can continue to drive growth"

- Too slowly, check.

"For me, it's now a time at this stage of the company to focus on profitable growth... And so that is the North Star for the company."

- Leans in. .. doing what?

" ...particularly on mobile, where we've just had an inferior experience. "

- Missed on mobile. Seems important.

"Braintree has really scaled very impressively over a number of years, and now it's upwards of 40% of your total payment volume."

- I hadn't heard that number recently.

Some other changes PayPal has made this week:

* Bring in a new CTO Srini Venkatesen from Walmart, who while not solely focused on payments, ran supply chain and omnichannel tech for the last 8 years. He also has ties to the area going back to eBay earlier in his career.

* Bringing in two new executives to drive the Consumer and Ad initiatives at the company.

Lots of changes. What to expect?

2024 I would expect a similar trajectory than before. PayPal is a large battleship, and the elephant dances slowly. Next year, the test will be: what is the uptake of both consumers and merchants to the new technology?

For merchants, need to prioritize adopting new initiatives like Fastlane. For consumers, PayPal needs to become a better mobile habit in a crowded market. The concern is PayPal missed the mobile window in a similar manner to Microsoft missing cloud for 5-6 years and let Amazon in the door. PayPal has let Apple Pay and Shop Pay continue to rise.

There's still Venmo, however. We'll always have Venmo, right? The fact that the greatest PayPal assets are acquisitions, however, might give you some clue they need to ramp those up to leap forward.

Watch for this in 2025.