Dear Colleagues, Customers, Partners and Stockholders:
In 2022, PayPal continued to navigate a global macroeconomic environment marked by high levels of disruption and uncertainty. A slowing economy, inflation and geopolitical unrest put significant pressure on both consumers and businesses around the world. Despite this backdrop, we again rose to every challenge and opportunity presented over the past year, and I could not be prouder of our team’s work.
We have taken many essential steps to right-size our cost structure, streamline our operating model and sharpen our focus, and we believe this has set the stage for our next phase of growth. While some of these decisions have been difficult, we have made significant progress in our transformation efforts, and our fourth quarter results demonstrate that we hit a positive inflection point at the end of 2022. Although many of the challenges that we faced last year will continue into 2023, I’m more confident than ever that PayPal is poised to emerge from this period in a position of increased strength.
Looking Ahead
Looking forward to 2023 and beyond, I want to reiterate the key priorities that will ultimately enable us to better serve our customers, leverage our competitive advantages to increase our market share and deliver long-term, sustainable growth for our stockholders. First, branded checkout is at the core of what we do, and continually improving this experience will remain our highest priority. Next, we are building on the redesign of our digital wallets that we undertook last year to innovate and improve our current offerings – including Buy Now, Pay Later and Rewards – to provide even more value for our customers. We are also continuing our work to extend our platform into in-person contexts, so that customers have a seamless experience between our PayPal and Venmo branded cards and our apps. We are doubling down on Braintree, and fully ramping PayPal Complete Payments to provide powerful payment processing capabilities to merchants of all sizes. Lastly, we are continuing to strengthen foundational capabilities that enable and support our expanding value proposition for both consumers and merchants to ensure that our technical infrastructure and collaboration tools remain best-in-class.
My Retirement as CEO of PayPal
As I shared in early February, I informed the Board that I plan to retire as PayPal’s President and CEO at the end of this year. I plan to devote more time to my passions outside of the workplace. When I joined PayPal in 2014 – then part of eBay – I was looking for a company with passionate, engaged employees who wanted to make a real difference. Looking back, it is incredible to reflect on the tremendous growth that we have achieved together since PayPal became an independent, publicly traded company. Since that time almost nine years ago, our revenues, total payment volume and cash flow have roughly tripled in size. We have launched countless products, partnerships and improvements to better serve our customers and expand into new markets.
Today, we are empowering hundreds of millions of consumers and merchants to join and thrive in the global economy, and we’re contributing every day to expanding economic opportunity for customers and communities around the world. Together, we have established PayPal as the global leader in digital payments, one of the most trusted brands and a company that truly makes a difference in the world. The past year and a half has not been easy for our employees or shareholders as we adjusted to a more challenging macroeconomic environment and significant geopolitical uncertainty. Before I made the decision to move on to my next chapter, I wanted to be sure that PayPal had positive momentum and was well-positioned to deliver a strong year of performance. We have made considerable progress and I fully believe we have reached that point. I have complete trust in the Board to conduct a thorough search for the best possible leader and ensure a smooth, thoughtful transition – and I look forward to continuing to serve on the Board following the transition.
Profit and Purpose
PayPal is proof that profit and purpose go hand-in-hand and leading a company that delivers results for all of its stakeholders has truly been the highlight of my career. I am proud of the ways that we have leaned into the bold aspirations of our mission and our values to support our employees, customers and the broader communities in which we live, work and serve.
In the last year, we have continued to advance our employee financial wellness initiative to strengthen the financial security of our workforce. We provided financial wellness awards to hourly and entry-level employees and changed the vesting schedule of our restricted stock unit grants to give employees earlier and more frequent access to their shares. We introduced our Leadership Principles to help us grow as leaders and foster stronger connections between our teams – whether in-person or virtually. In 2023, we launched Global Collaboration Days where we regularly gather in our offices for formal and informal collaboration that complement our hybrid working model and preserves the flexibility that we know is important to our employees. Stronger connections between our teams, deep collaboration and professional development opportunities are all important elements to successfully executing against our strategic priorities.
We have also lived our mission and values, using the power of the PayPal platform and community to support our merchants, consumers and those in need. Since Russia invaded Ukraine more than one year ago, the PayPal community has rallied to provide aid to Ukrainians, and our own employees stepped up to expedite the expansion of PayPal services to Ukrainian customers. Over the past year, more than $600 million was donated on our platform to charities responding to the ongoing humanitarian crisis, and we have helped Ukrainian citizens receive and send more than $600 million in person-to-person payments and money transfers, for a total of $1.2 billion in monetary support facilitated through our platform. In the wake of the destructive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and the devastating effects of Hurricane Ian, we mobilized our customers and employees to launch disaster relief campaigns. In 2022 alone, we processed $20 billion for charitable organizations and causes, demonstrating the strength we have as a global community and the power of driving social impact through our core business.
Thank you.
Dan Schulman
President and CEO, PayPal Holdings, Inc.
April 13, 2023
Sincerely yours,
John J. Donahoe
Independent Board Chair
April 13, 2023
Read the original letter here.
