Alex Chriss

Alex Chriss
Nationality	American
Occupation	Business executive
Title	Former President and CEO, PayPal Holdings
Known for	President and CEO of PayPal Holdings (2023–2026)

Alex Chriss is an American business executive who served as President and Chief Executive Officer of PayPal Holdings from September 2023 until February 2026. Prior to leading PayPal, Chriss held senior leadership roles at Intuit, where he oversaw the company's Small Business and Self-Employed Group. Appointed to lead PayPal during a period of declining market value and intensifying competition in the digital payments industry, Chriss undertook a turnaround effort that included new product launches, international expansion initiatives, and attempts to modernize PayPal's merchant-facing technology. His tenure ended in early 2026 when PayPal's board of directors replaced him with Enrique Lores, the former CEO of HP Inc., citing dissatisfaction with the pace of change and execution at the company. During his approximately two-and-a-half-year leadership of PayPal, Chriss navigated a complex landscape of fintech competition, legacy technology challenges, and shifting consumer payment preferences, ultimately departing amid a significant decline in the company's share price.

Career

Intuit

Before joining PayPal, Alex Chriss spent over a decade at Intuit, the financial software company known for products such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. At Intuit, he rose through the ranks to become Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Small Business and Self-Employed Group, one of the company's largest and most strategically important divisions. In this capacity, Chriss oversaw the QuickBooks ecosystem, which served millions of small businesses and independent contractors with accounting, payroll, and payment processing tools. His experience at Intuit provided him with deep familiarity with the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, merchant services, and the broader fintech ecosystem — expertise that PayPal's board considered relevant to the company's strategic direction when selecting him as CEO.

Appointment as PayPal CEO

In 2023, PayPal's board of directors selected Chriss to succeed Dan Schulman as President and CEO. Chriss assumed the role in September 2023, inheriting a company that had experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune following the COVID-19 pandemic era. During the pandemic, PayPal had benefited enormously from the surge in e-commerce and digital payments, with its share price reaching historic highs. However, by the time Chriss took over, PayPal's stock had fallen substantially from those peaks as growth decelerated, competition from rivals such as Apple Pay, Block (formerly Square), and Stripe intensified, and questions mounted about the long-term viability of PayPal's core checkout business.

Chriss arrived with a mandate to reinvigorate PayPal's product offerings, improve its technology platform, and restore investor confidence. He articulated a vision centered on modernizing PayPal's merchant checkout experience, expanding the company's financial services offerings to consumers, and leveraging artificial intelligence to improve transaction processing and fraud detection.

Strategic Initiatives

During his tenure as CEO, Chriss pursued several strategic initiatives aimed at repositioning PayPal for long-term growth. Among the most prominent were efforts to expand PayPal's branded product suite beyond its traditional online checkout button.

In the United Kingdom, PayPal under Chriss's leadership moved to introduce its own branded debit and credit cards as well as a loyalty program, in what The Times described as "a bid to conquer the high street." These physical financial products represented an attempt to extend PayPal's reach beyond digital-only transactions and into everyday in-store spending, thereby increasing the frequency with which consumers engaged with the PayPal brand.

Chriss also pursued expansion in emerging markets. In the Middle East and Africa, he articulated a long-term commitment to the region, stating that PayPal's presence would "spur innovation and support entrepreneurs, while accelerating economic growth." This geographic expansion strategy aimed to tap into the rapid growth of digital commerce in regions where traditional banking infrastructure remained underdeveloped and mobile-first payment solutions had significant adoption potential.

Technologically, Chriss emphasized the integration of artificial intelligence into PayPal's platform and sought to modernize the company's checkout experience for online merchants. The goal was to reduce friction in the payment process, improve conversion rates for merchants, and make PayPal's checkout competitive with newer, faster alternatives that had eroded its market position.

Challenges During Tenure

Despite these initiatives, Chriss faced persistent headwinds throughout his time as CEO. According to reporting by Payments Dive, slow merchant adoption of PayPal's latest technology and lagging growth of its legacy checkout services stymied the company's overall growth trajectory. PayPal's core branded checkout product — the button that appears on millions of e-commerce websites — faced increasing competition from alternative payment methods, including digital wallets offered by technology giants and buy-now-pay-later services that had gained traction among younger consumers.

The company's unbranded payment processing business, which handled transactions behind the scenes without the PayPal name visible to consumers, operated in an intensely competitive and lower-margin segment of the market. Balancing growth between the higher-margin branded business and the faster-growing but less profitable unbranded processing business proved to be a central tension during Chriss's leadership.

PayPal's share price, which had already declined substantially before Chriss took the helm, failed to recover meaningfully during his tenure. Fortune noted that Chriss "lasted barely two years after failing to halt a massive slide in PayPal's share price." Investor sentiment remained negative as quarterly earnings reports showed that the turnaround was proceeding more slowly than the market expected.

Bloomberg characterized Chriss's efforts as a "turnaround plan" that ultimately "failed" to produce the results the board desired.

Departure from PayPal

On February 3, 2026, PayPal's board of directors announced that Chriss would be replaced as President and CEO by Enrique Lores, the outgoing CEO of HP Inc., effective March 1, 2026. The announcement came alongside the company's fourth-quarter 2025 earnings results, which missed profit expectations.

The Associated Press reported that PayPal's board stated "the pace of change and execution at the company has not met board" expectations, prompting the leadership change. Simultaneously, David W. Dorman was appointed as independent board chair.

The market reaction to the announcement was sharply negative. PayPal's stock fell approximately 16 percent following the news of the CEO change combined with the earnings miss, according to Seeking Alpha. The stock decline reflected investor uncertainty about yet another leadership transition at a company that had struggled to define its strategic direction in the post-pandemic era.

Fortune described the move as a "surprise shake-up," noting the unusual nature of poaching a sitting CEO from another major technology company to replace Chriss. The appointment of Lores, who had led HP through its own period of transformation, signaled PayPal's board interest in a leader with experience managing large-scale organizational change and operational efficiency improvements.

Payments Dive published a detailed analysis titled "What went wrong at PayPal," examining the structural and strategic factors that contributed to Chriss's inability to accelerate growth sufficiently. The analysis pointed to the fundamental difficulty of reviving a legacy digital payments platform in an era when the competitive landscape had fragmented significantly, with banks, technology companies, and fintech startups all offering overlapping payment solutions.

Chriss's departure marked the second CEO transition at PayPal in less than three years, following Dan Schulman's retirement in 2023. The rapid succession of leadership changes underscored the depth of the challenges facing the company and the difficulty of executing a turnaround in a fast-moving industry.

Personal Life

Chriss has maintained a relatively private personal life. The Times characterized him as a "no-nonsense tech bro" in a January 2026 profile, reflecting his direct communication style and technology industry background. Details of his personal life, family, and early background beyond his professional career remain largely undisclosed in publicly available reporting.

Recognition

As CEO of PayPal, one of the largest digital payments companies in the world, Chriss held a prominent position in the financial technology industry. PayPal processes billions of dollars in transactions annually and operates in markets worldwide, making the CEO role one of the most visible in fintech. Chriss's appointment in 2023 attracted significant attention from financial media and industry observers, as did his departure in 2026.

His efforts to expand PayPal into physical financial products such as debit and credit cards and into new geographic markets, including the Middle East and Africa, represented an attempt to redefine the company's identity beyond its origins as an online checkout service. While these initiatives did not produce sufficient results to satisfy PayPal's board during his tenure, they represented a strategic direction that his successor may continue to pursue.