On Feb. 24, 2026, a Bloomberg report (picked up by Reuters) said Stripe is considering acquiring PayPal—or parts of it. Both companies declined to comment, and Reuters couldn’t independently verify the report, so treat this as early-stage, high-noise talk for now.
Still, even as a rumor, it’s an unusually revealing one—because Stripe and PayPal are now the closest thing fintech has to a mirror test:
- Stripe says businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025 (+34% YoY) and that the company’s tender offer valued Stripe at $159 billion.
- PayPal processed $1.79 trillion of total payment volume (TPV) in 2025 (+7% YoY), ran 25.4 billion payment transactions, and ended the year with 439 million active accounts.
Two networks. Roughly $2T each. Very different market narratives—and very different valuations.
If Stripe really is sniffing around PayPal, the interesting question isn’t “will it happen?”
It’s: what does Stripe think it needs that it can’t build fast enough on its own?
The strangest datapoint in fintech right now: similar scale, radically different “worth”
PayPal’s latest annual numbers look like a business that’s huge, profitable, and maturing:
- Net revenues: $33.17B (2025) vs $31.80B (2024)
- Net income: $5.23B (diluted EPS $5.41)
- Capital return: PayPal said it repurchased $6B of shares in 2025 and ended Q4 with $14.8B in cash/cash equivalents/investments and $11.6B in debt.
And yet, the takeover chatter itself tells you how cheap the market has become willing to price it: PayPal’s shares jumped on the report, putting its market value around the $40B neighborhood.
Stripe, meanwhile, is telling a very different story—less “payments company,” more “programmable financial services layer for the internet economy.” Its press release doesn’t just mention volume. It also claims Stripe powers 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100—a way of saying: we’re infrastructure for giants now, not only startups.
So the mismatch becomes hard to ignore:
- Stripe’s 2025 volume: $1.9T
- PayPal’s 2025 TPV: $1.79T
Similar throughput. But Stripe’s implied “worth” is multiple-times PayPal’s public-market value. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s a signal: public markets are punishing mature consumer-fintech narratives, and rewarding infrastructure stories that still feel like platforms.
Which brings us to the deal logic.
Why PayPal might be “buyable” now (even if it isn’t “broken”)
PayPal’s leadership has been unusually candid lately about where momentum has lagged: online branded checkout. In its Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, PayPal described branded checkout as “pacing below our expectations.”
At the same time, PayPal is pointing to bright spots that look like separate businesses hiding inside the same ticker:
- Venmo: ~20% revenue growth to $1.7B in 2025 (excluding interest income), with 100M+ active accounts
- Buy Now, Pay Later: $40B+ in TPV in 2025 (growth “more than 20%”)
- Enterprise Payments / PSP: described as “turned around,” returning to double-digit volume growth in Q4
This is exactly the kind of portfolio that invites banker-speak: unlock shareholder value. Wall Street commentary around the rumor has already gravitated toward asset-level interest (think Venmo, or the enterprise/processing stack) rather than a clean whole-company takeout.
So if you’re Stripe, looking at PayPal from 30,000 feet, you don’t see one business. You see at least three:
- A global consumer identity + wallet footprint (PayPal + Venmo)
- A large merchant/enterprise processing engine
- A bundle of credit, BNPL, risk, and value-added services that can be re-priced, reattached, and re-packaged
The question becomes: which one is the prize?
Why Stripe would want PayPal (and why it probably doesn’t want all of it)
Stripe doesn’t need PayPal to “be big.” It already is. Stripe says businesses on Stripe generated $1.9T in total volume in 2025, and its tender offer pegged valuation at $159B.
So what does Stripe not have?
1) A massive consumer “default identity” footprint
PayPal ended 2025 with 439M active accounts.
Stripe, by design, is merchant/developer-first. It’s everywhere—but mostly behind the scenes.
If commerce is moving toward passkeys, biometrics, and “one-click” authorization, then the advantage shifts toward whoever owns the trust credential at checkout. PayPal is explicitly betting on this: the earnings call transcript talks about scaling redesigned checkout experiences and biometric/passkey adoption as core to restoring momentum.
Stripe has Link. PayPal has PayPal/Venmo at global scale. That’s the consumer-shaped gap.
2) A different kind of distribution: the “default button”
Stripe’s power is product velocity and developer ergonomics. PayPal’s power is the button—the brand presentment. The two strengths are different, and in theory complementary.
In practice, this is also where the deal gets awkward: Stripe and PayPal overlap. Plenty of Stripe merchants already offer PayPal as a payment method. Owning PayPal changes incentives fast—and incentives are what kill integrations.
3) “Money movement” is splintering: cards, wallets, account-to-account, stablecoins
Stripe has been building optionality across rails. Its press release highlights Stripe’s “programmable financial services” posture, and it has leaned into crypto/stablecoin infrastructure through Bridge, a stablecoin platform Stripe acquired (and later announced it had completed).
Reuters also reported that Bridge obtained conditional approval from the U.S. OCC to establish a national trust bank, which—if finalized—would deepen Stripe’s access to regulated stablecoin/custody plumbing.
If you believe the next decade of payments is about orchestrating the cheapest, fastest, most compliant rail per transaction, PayPal’s global wallet footprint plus Stripe’s orchestration DNA starts to look like a “stack.”
But it’s also where the integration risk spikes.
The “smart” Stripe–PayPal deal is probably not the one everyone is imagining
A full takeover would be a headline-grabber, but there are three practical frictions:
- Financing and structure. Stripe is private. Buying a public company at a big premium is doable—but it’s not casual, and it changes Stripe’s own capital strategy overnight (especially days after a tender offer).
- Overlap and channel conflict. Stripe is a merchant platform. PayPal is a consumer brand + processor. Merging them invites fights over whose checkout wins, and which merchants get prioritized.
- Regulatory optics. Not just antitrust—also payments/data/consumer protection complexity across jurisdictions.
That’s why the more plausible paths look like parts, not the whole:
Scenario A: Stripe buys the enterprise/processing engine
This would be the pure “scale the pipes” move: acquire merchant processing volume, deepen enterprise relationships, and squeeze unit costs.
But the hard truth is that large-scale processing is also where take-rates compress. PayPal itself notes pressure in take rate dynamics; the transcript references a transaction take rate around 1.65% (excluding certain FX hedge impacts).
That is not the profile of a high-multiple software business. It’s the profile of a scale business.
Scenario B: Stripe buys the consumer identity layer (Venmo / wallet assets)
Venmo’s 2025 numbers—$1.7B revenue, 100M+ active accounts—read like the outline of a consumer fintech that could stand alone.
If Stripe’s long game is “agentic commerce” (AI agents buying on behalf of users), then owning a consumer permission layer becomes strategically valuable: identity, funding sources, fraud signals, and disputes—all in one place.
Scenario C: No acquisition—just a strategic détente
The most under-discussed possibility is that this ends as a partnership, not a purchase: deeper PayPal/Venmo acceptance in Stripe-powered checkouts, joint work on passkeys, or even stablecoin-based cross-border settlement experiments.
In other words: integrate the strengths without inheriting the baggage.
What to watch next (the signals that matter more than the headlines)
If this is real—and not just banker-led “strategic review theater”—you’ll likely see clues in five places:
- Asset-level language: any hint of “exploring strategic alternatives” around Venmo or enterprise processing
- Merchant roadmap shifts: sudden reprioritization of PayPal/Venmo presentment across large platforms
- Capital allocation posture: PayPal’s continued buybacks/dividend posture vs. a pivot to “balance-sheet flexibility”
- Regulatory pre-positioning: filings, licensing changes, or governance moves that simplify cross-border approvals
- AI + identity packaging: new bundles that tie checkout conversion to passkeys, rewards, and upstream placement (PayPal is already framing this as the path back).
The big idea: the next payments giant isn’t “a payments company”
Here’s the thought experiment the rumor forces:
If two firms can each process roughly $2 trillion a year, then “payments volume” is no longer the differentiator. The differentiator is:
- who owns identity and authorization at the moment of purchase,
- who can route transactions across rails with the least friction and loss, and
- who can attach higher-margin services (risk, tax, invoicing, credit, subscriptions) without feeling like a tax.
Stripe’s narrative is that it’s becoming the operating system for internet commerce. PayPal’s narrative is that it still owns one of the world’s most recognized checkout identities—while trying to modernize execution and presentment.
If Stripe is indeed looking at PayPal, it’s best understood as a bet on the next layer of fintech:
not moving money—deciding how money moves, and who gets to say “yes” at checkout.
