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Posted by rvz 18 hours ago

Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources(www.reuters.com)
203 points | 104 commentspage 2
Topology1 3 hours ago|
Do the processing fees really add up? Can't fathom that Stripe is big enough to buy PayPal, but maybe I'm just 10 years behind on this industry.
nailer 2 hours ago||
Yes. People are prepared to pay Stripe 1% of all their revenue, same way they're prepared to pay card companies 2%.
taylorbuley 2 hours ago||
My worry is that fees might go through the roof without any other options
coredev_ 3 hours ago||
Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.
xp84 3 hours ago||
Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Internet" guys might find a way to disintermediate them somehow.
onlypassingthru 2 hours ago|||
Zelle was built to preempt FedNow. The banks saw what was coming and wanted to own instant payments.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

toast0 2 hours ago||||
> Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users,

At least for me, Zelle is something I can do in my bank app, so I don't need to work with anything I wasn't already using.

It feels a lot easier to use than Venmo, but I dunno. It's one of like 7 options I have to transfer in the bank app.

kelvinjps10 58 minutes ago|||
what's the problem with zelle? it works in my bank app, it's fast, no fees, it's really easy to use
nozzlegear 3 hours ago|||
If I'm buying something from a website and they don't offer Apple Pay, I'll opt for PayPal instead since I already have my credit/debit cards saved there and don't want to hand over numbers to a random website. Also, when I used to do more freelancing, all of my clients preferred to be invoiced and pay through PayPal (who skimmed a decent chunk of change off the top).

Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.

muvlon 3 hours ago|||
Interesting that you'd mention Brazil. I consider it one of the very few examples of countries successfully replacing PayPal with a publicly owned service. Pix is ubiquitous in Brazil and has been for years. It has not only displaced PayPal but also cash and (in large parts) Visa/MasterCard, even in the face of US tariff threats.
usrnm 3 hours ago||
It's actually pretty common for local payment systems to exist, it's not just Brazil. I've seen such systems in Europe, Asia, Africa and I'm sure they exist in other places I've never been to
muvlon 2 hours ago||
Oh they exist all over the place. Pix is just unique in its success. It has only been around for ~5 years and it's completely taken over the country.
rglover 3 hours ago||
Consolidation (move toward making Stripe the only game in town).
coredev_ 1 hour ago||
PayPal seems to me like something from the past that no one uses. But sure, they have a market and a profit, but a future?

Will Stripe move customers from PayPal to Stripe or will they fix PayPal?

nikolay 11 hours ago||
PayPal owns Venmo, though.
kayo_20211030 3 hours ago|
Wow! TIL. Totally ignorant is I.
ck2 3 hours ago||
I really do not grasp business when PayPal is somehow worth over $50 Billion

It doesn't have assets? It's not a bank

Is it because PayPal is integrated already into so many websites?

Wouldn't it take decades to make back $50 Billion in fees?

jc_811 3 hours ago||
If you look at their financials, they’re clearly making money. In 2025 they had 33B in revenue with a net income of 5.2B
hyperbovine 3 hours ago||
PayPal is sort of the Facebook of digital payments: they stopped being directly relevant years ago, but own many of the things that you or someone you know continue to use. Venmo being the obvious one, but also Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Bill Me Later, etc.
tmtvl 2 hours ago|||
Doesn't PayPal confiscate your money if you forget to withdraw it in time?
rwaksmunski 3 hours ago|||
It's a bank in Europe
wyre 3 hours ago||
According to Wikipedia they hold $80 billion in assets.

They also hold a lot of financial data of its users, which is certainly worth more than anything that could ever make sense to my pleb brain.

thunderfork 3 hours ago||
Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?
pembrook 2 hours ago||
Not great tbh.

The more time goes on, I'm starting to come around to paypal's original vision of decentralized internet-native money as being the future.

The more the international system breaks down and countries abuse their power via the banking system (especially the US, and from both parties), my opinion of cryptocurrencies transitions from "annoying scam infrastructure for hucksters" to "actually...you might have a point." Still a ton of growing up that needs to be done by the industry.

But no company or country should be able to tax the global economy via payments monopoly and you should not be able to be arbitrarily banned from the economy by these global supra-national intermediaries that have no court system and no democratic levers to pull to reign in their overreach in your country outside of desperate social media posts.

Stripe brags incessantly about how much of global GDP they facilitate...which, cool. I don't doubt there's an insane amount of work required to herd all those global cats and make payments just work. But, they're literally taxing the entire world as a % of GDP due to this dystopian legacy system? Is that the best outcome for humanity?

kotaKat 10 hours ago||
So... I got banned from PayPal (with no explanation) and Stripe closed my account (with no recourse for 'crowdfunding' after linking to Ko-Fi).

Cool, awesome, that's gonna be a great monopolistic picture for those that get unbanked across the entire Internet.

1970-01-01 3 hours ago|
I've been thru 3 or 4 'lifetime' bans with PayPal. Just ask to be reinstated during the next big shakeup (now) and they'll let you back in. They want your money. They want your business. The exact same things you couldn't sell 25 years ago, the things that got you banned, are now listed online without care. They literally forget.
zuzululu 3 hours ago||
thrilled that stripe is buying paypal
lobito25 17 hours ago|
2 poo companies
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