Former PayPal president criticises company's decline in competitiveness

PayPal's former chief executive, David Marcus, expressed concern over the major fintech, remarking it's "lost its edge."

In a lengthy post on X (formerly Twitter), Marcus elaborated on several issues within PayPal, a fintech leader based in San Jose, over the years. 

Marcus parted with PayPal in 2014 and later contributed to Coinbase and Meta. He is also the founder and now CEO of a payment service firm, Lightspark.

He mentioned waking up to messages from ex-colleagues at PayPal that prompted him to "finally share his thoughts."

During its recent earnings, where it shared profit and sales declines, the firm revealed that its CEO, Alex Chriss, would be succeeded by Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Enrique Lores.

In the LinkedIn-shared post, Marcus stated that "product determination was overshadowed by financial strategising" at PayPal.

Marcus compared PayPal to rivals like Apple Pay, Visa, Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay. He mentioned that PayPal has trailed behind in buy-now-pay-later features, stating that the company has overly relied on generic checkouts and lost transaction volume due to eBay.

Additionally, PayPal has made unwise acquisitions, according to Marcus, pointing to the online rewards company Honey and the financial services brand Xoom as "ill-suited for PayPal" and "distractions."

Marcus concluded his post with critiques of the company's executive decisions. 

He commented that Chriss, PayPal's present CEO, came from a software background as opposed to payments, prompting a departure of knowledgeable payment team leaders.