Stripe and Advent International have offered $60.50 a share in cash for PayPal, a bid that values the payments company at more than $53bn and arrives backed by about $50bn in committed financing from banks.

The buyers would hold equal stakes in the business and, unusually for a proposal with a private equity firm attached, say they would not break it up.

The offer went in earlier this month and follows an initial approach in early April, and PayPal has responded to neither.

Advent is no stranger to this corner of the market: it took the Canadian processor Nuvei private in a $6.3bn deal in 2024, and Nuvei is currently buying Payoneer for $2.75bn on the explicit promise of building a rival to Stripe.

If the PayPal bid lands, Advent will be funding both sides of that fight.

The $60.50 works out at roughly 28% above Tuesday's close of about $47. Set against the share price, it is a generous number.

Set against PayPal's own history, it is charity: the company's market value peaked near $360bn in 2021, touched roughly $36bn earlier this year, and has fallen more than 40% in the past 12 months.

PayPal's decline has been slow and legible. Founded in the late 1990s, and for a decade the default way to pay a stranger online, it has watched Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a generation of fintech rivals take the habit away.

The company is also six months into a leadership reset. In February, the board removed chief executive Alex Chriss, said the pace of change and execution under him had not matched its expectations, and issued a 2026 profit forecast so far below Wall Street's that the shares fell 19% in a session. Enrique Lores, until then the chief executive of HP, took the job on March 1.

Analysts at Evercore ISI wrote at the time that the open question was whether the incoming chief executive would "bring in a formidable payments team to attempt yet another multi-year turnaround or look to start reviewing options for strategic assets." Five months on, somebody else has raised the second option on his behalf.

Lores has moved quickly. In April he split PayPal into three units, covering checkout, consumer financial services and Venmo, and payments and crypto.

In May he set out a plan to use AI to strip duplicated layers of work out of the organisation, worth about $1.5bn in savings over two to three years, all of it earmarked for reinvestment.

It appears to be working at the margins. First-quarter revenue rose 7% to $8.35bn against an $8.05bn consensus, and total payment volume grew 8% on a currency-neutral basis to roughly $464bn.

The bid has arrived at a company that has stopped falling rather than one that has started climbing.

Stripe comes at it from the opposite direction. It was valued at $159bn in a February tender offer for employees and shareholders, more than 70% above a comparable sale a year earlier, and processed $1.9tn of payments in 2025, up 34%.

It is privately held, co-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, and its co-founder John Collison has argued that agentic commerce will remake online shopping outright.

Payments has been consolidating around that thesis for a while. Global Payments agreed to take Worldpay off FIS and GTCR for $24.25bn last year, Mastercard paid up to $1.8bn for BVNK, and Airwallex raised at $11bn last month on the theory that software agents will shortly be doing the buying.

Owning PayPal would hand Stripe the one thing none of that money can build quickly, which is a consumer brand people already trust with a card number.

Stripe and Advent are seeking to advance discussions in the coming weeks, and are pushing for a deal by the end of the month. PayPal, Stripe, and Advent all declined to comment. There is no certainty any of it produces a transaction.