Stripe and Advent offer $60.50 a share for PayPal as experts focus on stablecoins, checkout and the integration problem

Stripe and Advent International have reportedly offered $60.50 a share for PayPal, valuing the company at more than $53bn and putting a hard number on a deal that would redraw parts of the payments stack. The commentary from payments specialists is less about the headline valuation than about what a combined business could actually build, with the same obstacle coming up again and again: integration.

1. According to Reuters, Stripe and Advent made a joint approach to buy PayPal at $60.50 a share, with roughly $50bn of committed bank financing from J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Stripe and Advent would contribute $17bn of equity and own PayPal equally, and the price was reported to represent a premium of about 28 per cent to PayPal’s share price before the approach became public.
2. Two days later, Reuters reported that PayPal’s board considers the offer inadequate. The company has not formally responded, and the board’s preliminary view is that the price does not reflect what management believes it can deliver by finishing its turnaround. Stripe, Advent and PayPal have all declined to comment, so for now the deal logic is still being reconstructed from unnamed sources rather than from filings or company statements.
3. This is not the first approach. Reuters reported an earlier one in early April, when Block joined Stripe and Advent before withdrawing ahead of the current offer. PayPal then reorganised itself on 29 April into a simplified three-business structure covering checkout, consumer financial services and Venmo, and payment services and crypto, with Braintree, small business processing and the PYUSD stablecoin placed together under the last unit.
4. Enrique Lores, who became chief executive in March after the board judged that progress under Alex Chriss had been too slow, is running a turnaround that includes cutting roughly a fifth of the workforce, about 4,760 roles, for at least $1.5bn in gross run-rate savings. PayPal’s market value peaked near $360bn in 2021 and fell to a low of roughly $36bn this year; that collapse is what made an approach possible in the first place.
5. For Philip Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at ACI Worldwide, the interesting part is not a sudden change in consumer behaviour but infrastructure. “A combined Stripe-PayPal would have the potential to accelerate the adoption of stablecoin-enabled payments,” he said, although he added that the biggest impact is likely to be in merchant infrastructure and checkout. In other words: the prize is not just who processes the payment, but who controls the rails around it.

For high-risk PSPs, the useful takeaway is straightforward. If this deal moves, the competitive pressure would not come only from scale in card processing or checkout. It would also come from the pairing of Stripe’s distribution and PayPal’s merchant footprint with crypto and stablecoin infrastructure already sitting inside PayPal’s reorganised structure. The catch, as the commentary makes plain, is that regulatory hurdles, integration complexity and valuation are still doing most of the work.