PayPal Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Enrique Lores said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 9 that the company’s restructuring efforts are deepening, with revised plans for cost savings, segment reporting and a rebalancing of its business away from branded checkout toward financial services.
PayPal, trading at $54.03 before the conference and $53.96 after hours on September 9, has a market capitalization of $45.5 billion and a P/E ratio of 9.91, with a trailing-twelve-month levered free cash flow of $6.6 billion.
Lores outlined five major changes now underway at the company: shifting focus from branded checkout to financial services; accelerating growth in Venmo and Braintree; rebalancing toward the consumer side of the network; simplifying the organization and cutting costs; and modernizing the technology stack over the next two years to integrate systems acquired over time.
The company has split into three business units — Checkout, Processing and Venmo, and Consumer Financial Services — each with its own profit-and-loss responsibility. Lores described an internal decision-making framework in which business leaders hold “51% of the vote,” giving them final call when consensus is not reached.
Segment reporting will be introduced next year, allowing investors to track individual business-unit performance. The company is targeting at least $1.5 billion in gross run-rate cost savings over two to three years and expects at least $6 billion in adjusted free cash flow. Management plans approximately $6 billion in share buybacks and continues a quarterly dividend yielding 1.07%.
Venmo posted revenue exceeding $1.7 billion in 2025, up roughly 20% from a year earlier, and has achieved seven consecutive quarters of double-digit total payment volume growth. The Venmo debit card connect rate rose more than 70% in the second quarter of 2025.
Branded Checkout growth is expected to come in at the low end of its range, in the 1% to 2% range for the third quarter. Tariff-related disruptions, particularly around the European de minimis threshold, were larger and longer lasting than originally anticipated, weighing on cross-border volumes tied to China. The original estimate for the tariff impact on TPV growth was 0.5 to 1.0 percentage point.
Other strategic moves include folding its buy-now-pay-later offering directly into checkout rather than running it as a standalone business, a new partnership with Amazon in Germany and a loyalty product launch in the same market. PayPal is narrowing its PayPal World remittance product to three core corridors — China, India and U.S. use cases — and building specialized sales teams for Braintree and its payment-service-provider business to drive adoption of value-added services such as payouts and risk-as-a-service. Local consumer teams are being assembled in selected countries.
Lores emphasized that the pivot toward consumers was a deliberate correction. “The majority of investment, the majority of attention of the company for some time had been on the merchant side, not on the consumer side,” he said. On accountability within the new structure, he added, “When it is clear who makes the decision, it is clear who is accountable.”
Looking ahead, Lores framed trust as the defining challenge for what he called agentic commerce — autonomous AI-driven purchasing. “Trust will be critical from the consumer perspective to know whether the merchants they will be interacting with are real, and from a merchant perspective to make sure the consumers they are interacting with are real consumers,” he said.
