Spanish Enrique Lores will take over Paypal, the electronic payment platform, on March 1. The company has replaced its CEO, Alex Chriss, who arrived in 2023 with the mandate to bring new life to the company and its actions, but his efforts have fallen short, despite the Board of Directors thanking him for advancements in monetizing Venmo (a kind of American Bizum) and the BNPL business (buy now, pay later).
The announcement of Lores' appointment comes as the group publishes disappointing results that are causing the stock to drop by 15% in the pre-market trading. With this decline, Paypal's shares have lost nearly 60% of their value in the last year, and the market capitalization is below $40 billion.
"Although some progress has been made in various areas over the past two years, the pace of change and execution is not in line with the Board's expectations," the company emphasizes in its statement regarding the last two years.
Lores takes on the role after six years as CEO of the electronic device manufacturer HP and is no stranger to Paypal. The executive has been on its board for almost five years and has been its chairman for a year and a half.
"We want to strengthen the culture of innovation necessary to achieve long-term transformation that balances short-term execution with more speed and precision," Lores points out in the statement.
The company founded by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, among others, was one of the pioneers of electronic payments, but the profound transformation this industry has undergone has deteriorated the perception that it leads the sector, and the company's stock is far from its annual highs.
Paypal has faced increasing competition from the banking, technology (Google and Apple), and fintech industries, both from neobanks like Revolut to platforms like Klarna that have grown from concepts like 'buy now, pay later'. Among the recent strategic changes made by the company now led by Lores is also a shift towards expanding its debit card model for payments in physical stores, a sign of how the digital payments industry is expanding into every aspect of customers' daily lives.