PayPal

Payments giant Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have reportedly submitted a joint confidential proposal to buy PayPal for $60.50 a share, valuing the company at over $53 billion. The offer represents a 28% premium over PayPal’s closing price before the news and is backed by about $50 billion in committed bank financing. Under the proposed terms, Stripe and Advent would take equal stakes and run PayPal as a 50/50 joint partnership, keeping the company intact rather than breaking it up. The bid highlights how far PayPal has fallen from its pandemic-era peak market cap of roughly $360 billion, and it comes amid a turnaround push by PayPal’s new CEO targeting over $1 billion in cost savings. For Stripe, a private company reportedly valued at around $160 billion, absorbing PayPal would dramatically scale its consumer footprint and add PayPal’s stablecoin to its ecosystem, though the deal’s structure raises questions about strategic fit and potential tensions between a growth-focused fintech and a private equity firm.

Stripe and Advent International have submitted an all-cash proposal to acquire PayPal for about $53 billion, or $60.50 per share, according to media reports. The offer represents a 28% premium to PayPal's unaffected closing price of $47.37 and includes roughly $17 billion of equity and committed bank financing. Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, Bernstein and Mizuho questioned whether the price would secure a deal, with Cantor's sum-of-the-parts analysis valuing PayPal closer to $70 per share. Stripe's incentives include adding PayPal's Braintree platform, which processes around $700 billion annually, and gaining access to 231 million monthly active consumers, including 67 million Venmo users. The deal would also combine Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure with PayPal's PYUSD, which has a market capitalisation of about $3 billion. Regulatory scrutiny is expected for a combination that would process about $3.2 trillion annually and account for more than 30% of global e-commerce.