I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?
I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.
Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.
It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.
I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.
Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.
This would be amazing! Its such a pain having to set up two payment solutions as a merchant and as a buyer it would be great if I could use my paypal credit on whatever purchase I want. Consumers want paypal and merchant want stripe. I really want this to happen.
PayPal user for 20+ years and it is time to end that dross
Nah, I hate them with a passion as a merchant but I absolutely love them as a buyer and customer.
There is a reason why after all these years and other solutions they're still everywhere, and it's not because of their great tooling, their low fees or their awesome support for merchant. It's not because of market lock in either, at least here in Europe they're merely a middle man between my credit card or sepa bank account and the merchant. It's because buyers trust it.
Buyers don't trust stripe. Stripe is for the merchant.
As a buyer I don't trust Paypal. They use dark patterns to try to get me to sign in, then make it hard to sign out, and for whatever reason my account is wedged and even though it has the correct payment details, the payments all fail. The UI is antiquated and the embedded version that has the animated progress bar GIF is sketchy at best. The Venmo app (which Paypal owns) is jammed with crappy ads and an often-broken UI.
Nah I thought I liked PayPal as a customer until I found out that they favor large merchants against the consumer. I had a problem with a product and the company was playing games with the warranty. I only had it for 3 months and it was already falling apart. I made a complaint with PP and it was auto denied.
I will never use PP for a large purchase again.
Yeah, any subscription I can push through PayPal, I do so, because I can cancel it directly on their end. I don't need to go through a ten click justification process with the merchant.
I don't trust either one.
And as a consumer, I especially hate PayPal because they always try to screw me with their currency conversion rates by hiding the toggle button (and it happens that I sometimes forget to toggle over to my bank's currency conversion)
And only once have I ever won a payment dispute there (and that was as a merchant, not a buyer... lol)
Sadly still chained to it for Discogs...
That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.
Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now
States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.
Just a couple of months ago, someone was still suing[1] to block Alaska Air/Hawaiian. This is a merger that already entirely went through. I would predict equal likelihood of some state lawsuit derailing a merger like this.
[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...
Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.
For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.
Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.
[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!
If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.
>If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
Upvote because AFAIK this is true. Not sure why your comment was downvoted to dead just a few minutes ago.
Gosh, with such efficiency of operations consumers will win because pricing of their services will be more efficient! Todays Feds will try selling that story.
Paypal is quite popular in Germany but with Wero that popularity will decrease significantly. I expect that all around the Europe.
Paying with Paypal is as easy as logging in. With Wero/iDeal you always need a phone or a code. People trust PayPal more too.
Wero has a for merchant/commerce part that integrates with PSPs. For instance Adyen: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/wero
But we aren't there yet.
I don't know if popular is quite the right word. It certainly is widely used though...
I like your optimism.
I have not tried Wero, but I have tried the german predecessor (paydirekt/giropay). It was ... not much less smooth than PayPal.
But I’ve only ever seen a single vendor offering it. 0 for Wero so far.
I don't think vendors can offer Wero yet. I think it's part of the merger with other European companies.
That is what keeps confusing me when people hype wero. It essentially (I think some limited trials?) doesn't exist for B2C, and sending money to friends is a very minor use case.
So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.
[delayed]
Wero is essentially iDeal. iDeal is great.
Great for merchants, not so much for consumers. Once the merchant has your money it's very difficult to get it back if things go wrong.
Trying to create a monopoly before the lack of antitrust enforcement window closes.
In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way.
If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.
What is the regulatory capture? Visa and master card have contract terms that ensure retail capture. That’s a private moat not regulation.
What’s stopping a new competitor to come in apart from regulations? You would expect someone already trying that given how profitable it is
The contracts with merchants prohibited them from accepting other forms of payment.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
The new competitor isn't able to offer better terms, maybe? Just an uneducated guess.
I doubt Stripe is anywhere near the monopoly status.
Back when selling online tech courses was viable (pre-AI), about 30% of transactions in the US were from folks using PayPal on the platform I used. There's a huge of people who use PayPal, it's even more outside of the US.
No reason it can’t be broken apart in the future. States will likely file suit, as twelve already have regarding the Paramount Warner deal.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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
Consolidation (move toward making Stripe the only game in town).
PayPal owns Venmo, though.
Wow! TIL. Totally ignorant is I.
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?
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
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.
Doesn't PayPal confiscate your money if you forget to withdraw it in time?
It's a bank in Europe
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.
Everyone rushing to get these consolidations done before America starts having anti-trust law again, huh?
thrilled that stripe is buying paypal
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.
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.
2 poo companies
I mean less competition is probably not good for anyone.
Except for Stripe and other payment gateway companies, of course
and their oligarch financiers
AI "sez": "PayPal's valuation has declined significantly from its peak of approximately $360 billion in 2021"
haven't been following the drop because otherwise I thought that Paypal was more valuable than Stipe + Advent combined (which seems to have previously been the case) - and so I would have thought Paypal would have been buying the other companies and that this was some weird way to try to devalue a competitor by offering to buy them