Dive Brief:

• Digital payments giant PayPal said in a press release late Thursday that it handed out stock awards to 435 non-executive employees this month. The stock grants were approved by the board last month and distributed on July 15, the company said.
• There were 411 employees who received a collective 264,598 restricted shares, with various vesting dates, 23 employees received 1,136 cash-settled restricted shares and three employees received 3,619 performance-based shares, the company said.
• The July 21 press release didn’t provide any explanation for the grants, but the distribution comes after the company’s stock has lost about 60% of its value this year, giving those who already have shares less reason to stick around. “These grants are normal course, new employee stock grants,” a PayPal Spokesperson Taylor Watson said in an emailed statement.

Dive Insight:

Stock is commonly distributed to employees at companies in a bid to retain them until the stock vests.

PayPal is making a bid to hang onto the new workers after cutting employees in various parts of the world earlier this year, from Dublin to Chicago to San Francisco. The employees were hired in the past month, Watson said.

The San Jose, California-based company has been on the ropes this year after it failed to reach prior growth goals for adding customer accounts. It has since pivoted away from that strategy, emphasizing new plans to better engage existing account holders and focus less on acquiring new ones.

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman also benefited from stock awards recently, receiving a 37% compensation package increase last year. Schulman’s total pay package, including salary and stock awards, jumped to $32.1 million for last year, compared to $23.4 million for 2020, according to the company’s proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That news arrived in April just a week after the company said that its chief financial officer at the time, John Rainey, would leave the company at the end of May to take the CFO post at retail juggernaut Walmart.

The macroeconomic environment has changed dramatically in recent months for fintechs like PayPal, with higher interest rates and rising inflation imperiling what has been strong spending by consumers in the past two years. While such digital payments companies have thrived amid increased e-commerce spending during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, that robust purchasing has begun to tail off this year.