Stripe’s Next Growth Engine Could Be PayPal’s Wallet

Stripe and PayPal have spent years expanding across digital commerce from opposite directions.

Stripe built its business by selling payments infrastructure to merchants. PayPal built its business by persuading consumers to choose PayPal when they reached checkout.

The differences have narrowed over time.

Stripe now offers billing, fraud management, embedded financial services and a growing range of commerce software. PayPal has expanded well beyond its branded checkout button through Braintree’s enterprise processing business, Venmo, merchant services and more recently, its PYUSD stablecoin.

An acquisition would bring those far-flung parts together.

As reported Wednesday (July 15), Stripe and Advent International have offered approximately $53 billion, or $60.50 per share, for PayPal.

Stripe is not publicly traded, but its latest annual figures indicate that the total volume generated by businesses running across its operations increased 34% year over year in 2025 and reached $1.9 trillion.

As for PayPal, the company ended the first quarter with 439 million active accounts, processed $463.96 billion in total payment volume, completed 6.48 billion payment transactions and generated $8.35 billion in revenue. Enterprise Payments, which includes Braintree, continued to grow at a mid-teens rate, while branded checkout also accelerated during the quarter. Transaction revenue benefited from growth across Braintree, PayPal products and Venmo.

Wall Street has cheered the move, sending PayPal shares up 16% in early trading on Wednesday.

In a note emailed to PYMNTS that same day, analysts at William Blair questioned whether those assets justify the reported purchase price. The firm argued that PayPal could dilute Stripe’s growth profile and concluded that the industrial logic for the acquisition is difficult to establish. It also questioned whether stablecoins alone provide sufficient rationale, noting that Stripe already owns Bridge and that PayPal USD remains relatively small compared with larger stablecoins.

Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS, reached a different conclusion.

“Analysts miss two big points,” she said, in commentary for this article. Divestitures may indeed be in the offing, but would not be central to the strategy here. With a nod to Stripe, she said that “they want the 420 million consumers with built-in wallets to give them a two-sided network to light up agentic shopping and agentic payments with stablecoins.”

Checkout Is Where the Competitive Questions Begin

The reported proposal also arrives at a time when checkout has become one of the most contested parts of digital commerce.

For years, payments companies competed primarily on authorization speed, acceptance rates and processing costs. Merchants are now asking different questions. How many clicks does checkout require? Can consumers pay with stored credentials? Does the wallet appear automatically? Can merchants recognize returning customers across channels? Can payment options be presented without adding friction?

PYMNTS Intelligence research in tandem with Visa Acceptance Solutions suggests those questions ripe for resolution.

The 2026 Global Digital Shopping Index found that 87% of merchants believe their checkout experience still needs improvement. Nearly 6 in 10 said their current payments technology may no longer meet business requirements within three years. Merchant concern extends beyond payment acceptance itself.

The report found broad adoption gaps in capabilities such as one-click checkout, stored credentials and other tools intended to shorten the path between selecting an item and completing a purchase. Only 23% of merchants said they can currently identify AI-generated shopping traffic and purchases, indicating that most businesses have not yet adapted their checkout systems to accommodate emerging purchasing models.

That research provides context for a Stripe/PayPal deal.

Stripe already supplies much of the infrastructure merchants use to build digital checkout. PayPal brings one of the most widely recognized consumer payment brands inside that checkout experience. The proposal would therefore combine software that merchants deploy with payment credentials consumers already use.

Beyond those firms, and in terms of other players in the commerce ecosystem, Visa and Mastercard would continue operating the card networks behind card-funded transactions. Banks would continue issuing cards and maintaining the deposit accounts that fund PayPal balances, Venmo transactions and card purchases. Merchant acquirers would continue competing for acceptance relationships.

Consumer behavior also helps explain why wallets (and thus firms like PayPal) occupy a larger role in the discussion than they might have several years ago.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that consumers experiencing higher financial stress are more than twice as likely as lower-stress consumers to use digital wallets for grocery and retail purchases. The report concludes that wallets are serving broader purposes than payment alone, combining stored credentials, budgeting tools and financing options within the same application.

Those trends do not determine whether the reported acquisition will proceed. Financing, valuation and regulatory review remain significant checkpoints along the road to any synthesis between the firms.