Dive Brief:

• PayPal CEO Alex Chriss, who took the company’s top post last September, landed a $41.92 million pay package for last year, with a $41.14 million stock award making up the majority of his compensation, according to a proxy filing by PayPal on Tuesday. That compares with $22.14 million in compensation last year for his predecessor, Dan Schulman.
• As far as cash, Chriss received nearly $800,000 in compensation for that first partial year, earning a $302,885 salary, a $164,384 incentive plan payment, and $311,840 in other compensation, the San Jose, California-based company said in the filing.
• While Chriss didn’t receive a sign-on bonus, the company’s new chief financial officer, Jamie Miller, received a $6 million sign-on bonus. The company’s former chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, received $2 million of his sign-on bonus last year, following on an initial $4 million paid out in 2022 when he started.

Dive Insight:

When Chriss was appointed last year, he took over a company that had grappled with profitable growth in recent years under the leadership of Schulman, whose compensation was slashed in the past two years. The significant stock grant for Chriss will presumably provide an incentive to revive the company’s sagging stock price, which is almost one-fifth what it was at its most recent peak in July 2021.

In determining Chriss’s compensation, the board considered his experience, responsibilities, “potential contributions,” and the pay afforded his predecessor, said a PayPal spokesperson. The company also considered competing offers he might receive and compensation at peer companies. In addition, PayPal took into account Chriss’s compensation at his former employer, Intuit, and the equity he forfeited when he left that software company.

“Alex’s total compensation package was determined carefully by the (board’s) Compensation Committee in consultation with its independent compensation consultant,” the spokesperson said by email. He will not receive any equity grant during this year’s reward cycle, the spokesperson noted.

Back in 2020, PayPal benefitted from a U.S. consumer transition to online shopping and commerce during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, raking in revenue when people began purchasing more goods and services from home. But in the past two years, the company has struggled to adapt to a post-pandemic environment with higher inflation and a surge in competition from tech titans, including Apple, and a swarm of new fintech startups.

Chriss faces the twin challenges of pressing forward with expansion of the company’s legacy PayPal button branded services and lifting the profitability of its unbranded businesses, including the Braintree unit. His management team has put a premium on increasing PayPal’s pricing power in the market and building up its small and mid-sized business clientele.

In addition to Miller, Chriss has hired a set of other new top executives to assist him in driving new strategies, including Michelle Gill, who was appointed executive vice president of the company’s small business and financial services group. Gill was awarded a $2 million sign-on bonus, and received half of it last year.