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PayPal Holdings Inc. announced early Monday that Alex Chriss, a long-time executive at Intuit Inc., will take over in September as chief executive, replacing Dan Schulman, who in February triggered the hunt for his successor when he announced he would retire later this year.
Chriss, a 19-year veteran at Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit, is an executive vice president at the technology company, best known for accounting products like QuickBooks and money-management tools like Mint. Since early 2019, he has been EVP and general manager of Intuit’s small business and self-employed group, controlling more than half the company’s revenue, according to PayPal’s release.
Chriss’s responsibility includes management of employees deployed globally and supporting such products as QuickBooks and Mailchimp, an e-mail and marketing platform Intuit acquired in 2021. “I am proud to take the baton from Dan and thrilled to have the opportunity to work with PayPal’s talented and committed team to build on PayPal’s remarkable history and draw on its unique capabilities to deliver outstanding products and services to businesses and consumers,” Chriss said in a statement.
Schulman, who in 2014 arrived from American Express Co. to run San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal as it spun off from long-time owner eBay Inc., made public his decision to retire in an earnings call weeks after turning 65 in January.
He said at the time he would serve through the end of 2023 to allow the board time to find a successor. “It’s never a good time to retire,” he said on the call. “It’s always a bittersweet moment.” Schulman will remain a PayPal board member until May, when the company will hold its annual stockholders’ meeting.
Chriss will be taking over a payments behemoth that grew steadily under Schulman’s leadership. Annual revenues have tripled since 2015, Schulman’s first full year as CEO, to $27.5 billion last year, on payment volume that rose from $288 billion to $1.36 trillion.
