PayPal to Cut Workforce by 9%

PayPal will eliminate about 2,500 positions, or about 9% of its workforce, this year.

The company aims to “right-size” its workforce by cutting jobs and by not filling open roles, PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said Tuesday (Jan. 30) in a letter to staff. Affected staff will be notified this week.

“While I have been encouraged by the innovation our team is delivering, we must execute faster and ensure we are focused on solving our customers’ most critical needs and problems,” Chriss said in the letter.

“Specifically, across our organization, we need to drive more focus and efficiency, deploy automation, and consolidate our technology to reduce complexity and duplication. We have started on that journey, but there is a lot of work to do — and 2024 marks a year of change, including some difficult but necessary decisions to get us to where we need to go.”

The move comes a year after PayPal cut 2,000 jobs and about five months after Chriss was appointed as CEO.

This comes a year after PayPal’s Jan. 31, 2023, announcement that it was laying off 2,000 employees, or about 7% of its global workforce at the time.

Dan Schulman, who was president and CEO at the time, said PayPal was cutting costs as part of a transformation being made in response to changes in the world, among customers and throughout the competitive landscape.

“Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macroeconomic environment while continuing to invest to meet our customers’ needs,” Schulman said in a message to employees. “While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do.”

Chriss, a longtime Intuit executive, was named by PayPal as its new president and CEO after a monthslong search for a successor to Schulman, who had announced plans to retire.

The report of a new round of job cuts at PayPal comes five days after the company announced a half-dozen new products and services that Chriss said will “revolutionize commerce.”