PayPal to trim workforce by 9% over 2024 in bid to streamline business
Almost exactly a year since it last endured mass layoffs, PayPal has announced it is set to axe around 9% of its workforce over 2024 in an effort to “right-size our business”.
PayPal set to axe more jobs throughout 2024
PayPal president and CEO Alex Chriss confirmed the move – which is expected to affect some 2,500 jobs – via a team-wide letter posted this week.
Roles are to be trimmed “through both direct reductions and the elimination of open roles over the course of the year”, Chriss writes.
Emphasising the action’s intent to “reduce complexity and duplication” and “maximize our reach, scale and resources”, he expects the job cuts to enable the US payments giant to “move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth”.
“We have started on that journey, but there is a lot of work to do – and 2024 marks a year of change, including some difficult but necessary decisions to get us to where we need to go.”
The cuts come almost 12 months after PayPal announced that it would be laying off approximately 2,000 employees in February 2023, with then president and CEO Dan Schulman attributing the move to the “challenging macro-economic environment”.
To lead its restructuring endeavours and drive the desired level of innovation and automation across the business in the months since, PayPal hired Alex Chriss in August upon the retirement of Schulman, and further bolstered its C-suite with the appointment of Archie Deskus as CTO and Jamie Miller as CFO in November.
The news comes amid a wave of job cuts across the wider financial services industry. Just this month alone, Citigroup, US fintech Brex, UK asset management firm Abrdn, and most recently Lloyds Banking Group have all announced plans to reduce their total staff headcounts.
