PayPal (PYPL) said on Tuesday that its chair, Enrique Lores, will take over as CEO of the payments services company on March 1.
Lores has been the CEO of computer and printer giant HP for six years. He will replace Alex Chriss as CEO of PayPal, the company said alongside the release of its fourth quarter earnings report.
“I think PayPal has a great future. We need to improve execution and make more progress in in the initiatives that we have in place. And this is going to be my goal doing to in the next year.,” Lores told Yahoo Finance by phone.
“I think it’s really improving or maintaining the momentum that we have in areas like Venmo or buy now, pay later,” Lores said of his early point of focus, adding “we need to improve our performance and grow our share in in branded checkout, which is the core business of the company. We have not been able to make the progress we wanted.”
Shares of PayPal tumbled over 15% in premarket trading following the earnings release and CEO news.
This will be a big shift for Lores, who joined HP as an engineering intern in 1989. Lores without question is battle tested, though.
He took over as HP CEO on Nov. 1, 2019, after helping several years earlier to lead the separation of HP from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). He quickly had to defend the company against a $35 billion hostile takeover bid from rival Xerox (XRX).
After doing that, he began to overhaul HP’s business and cut costs right in the middle of the pandemic. Now, he has taken HP into the era of AI computing.
Chriss has been officially leading PayPal since Sept. 27, 2023. He was handpicked by then PayPal chairman John Donahoe to replace his friend and long-time PayPal CEO Dan Schulman (who has since assumed the role of Verizon (VZ) CEO). Lores was appointed PayPal chair on July 24, 2024.
The first-time CEO Chriss honed his craft during a 19-year run at TurboTax parent Intuit (INTU), where he oversaw its lucrative small business segment. He played a key role in Intuit’s $12 billion acquisition of MailChimp in 2021, its largest deal ever made.
Chriss moved fast to overhaul the entire leadership team, bringing in outsiders such as former General Electric (GE) CFO Jamie Miller. Once the fresh C-suite was rounded out, he cut projects to focus the team on bigger bets and moving quicker.
He also inked a series of partnerships.
Shoppers using Amazon’s (AMZN) Buy with Prime feature can now pay via PayPal. The company has become an additional online credit and debit card processor for Shopify (SHOP) Payments.
