PayPal suffers another c-suite defection

The CFO is leaving one month after Dan Schulman announced his resignation.

The executive dominos keep falling at PayPal. Most recently, CFO Blake Jorgensen resigned after just a few months on the job. Jorgensen’s departure comes amid health issues and follows a leave of absence that he started in September. Jorgensen will stay on as a senior advisor through mid-September.  Last month, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced his plans to step down from the helm at the end of this year 

The timing couldn’t be worse for PayPal, with the company looking to right its ship after a tumultuous past year. It’s only been months since John Rainey, PayPal’s former finance chief, left for a similar role at big-box retailer Walmart. Investors handled the latest departure in stride, with shares down fractionally in after-hours trading on Thursday. 

PayPal says that Gabrielle Rabinovitch, who has been the acting CFO in Jorgensen’s absence, will stay on in the role. She’s been with the company since 2016.

Meanwhile, the latest PayPal exodus follows a string of executive departures at the payments company. Darrell Esch, who led the Venmo division, recently retired, while Jim Magats, who spent nearly two decades at PayPal, most recently as head of Omni Payments Solutions, left in August, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

PayPal is up against some tough headwinds. The e-commerce sector has slowed while the global economy has teetered near a recession. Nevertheless, PayPal’s boss said in the last earnings report that Q1 2023 was off to a running start. Schulman reiterated those comments at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on March 8, adding that the tide could be beginning to turn for the e-commerce sector. He pointed to cooling inflation and the potential strengthening of discretionary spending. 

Schulman also took the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds of beleaguered BNPL providers, noting that they’re having a “very tough time.” And as BNPL companies scramble to make money, PayPal is taking meaningful market share away from them, he said.

PayPal itself might be up against some stiff competition in the near future. Elon Musk was at the same conference at Schulman, where he discussed Twitter 2.0. This plan includes transforming Twitter into a super payments and commerce app. The regulatory wheels are reportedly already in motion for this to happen, as the social media giant looks to facilitate peer-to-peer payments on the platform.

“PayPal is kind of like a halfway version of what I think could be done in payments and finance,” Musk said at the event. Touché.