PayPal’s former president, David Marcus, raised concerns about the fintech giant, saying it’s “lost its mojo.”
In a long post on X, Marcus spoke about several flaws in PayPal, a San Jose-based fintech giant, across its history. Marcus left PayPal in 2014 and has since worked at Coinbase and Meta. He has also founded a payments company, Lightspark, where he is now CEO.
He said he had woken up to messages from former PayPal colleagues, which pushed him to “finally speak up.”
During its latest earnings call on Tuesday, where it reported profit and sales misses, the company announced that its CEO, Alex Chriss, would be replaced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Enrique Lores.
In the post, which he also shared on LinkedIn, Marcus said “product conviction gave way to financial optimization” at PayPal.
He compared PayPal with competitors like Apple Pay, Visa, Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay. He said PayPal has lagged behind on buy-now-pay-later payment features, adding that the company has leaned too heavily on unbranded checkouts and lost transaction volume on eBay.
PayPal also made some bad acquisition bets, Marcus said, citing the online rewards company Honey and the financial services company Xoom as “a wrong fit for PayPal” and “unnecessary distractions.”
Marcus’s post ended with criticisms of the company’s leadership decisions. He said Chriss, PayPal’s current CEO, came from a software background rather than payments, and caused an exodus from the leadership team who were knowledgeable about payments.
And he said it was repeating the same mistake with its new CEO, Lores.
“I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company,” Marcus wrote.
He added that PayPal had “lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.”
Representatives for PayPal and Lightspark did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Marcus’s comments come at a tense moment for the fintech company. Its stock dropped about 20% since the earnings and CEO announcement, and it is down more than 50% in the past year.
The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $8.68 billion, a 4% increase from the same period the year before.
