The bid, first floated earlier this month, represents a 28% premium over PayPal’s Tuesday closing price and comes with roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing already lined up.

Under the proposal, Stripe and Advent would split ownership of PayPal evenly and keep the company intact rather than break it apart. A previous approach had been made in early April, and the two firms are reportedly hoping to advance discussions over the coming weeks.

PayPal, Stripe, and Advent have all declined to comment, and PayPal has yet to respond publicly to the offer. Investors reacted quickly: PayPal shares jumped as much as 20% in premarket trading Wednesday.

The offer lands at a low point for a company that once towered over digital payments. PayPal’s market value peaked near $360bn in 2021 but has since sunk as low as roughly $36 billion this year, squeezed by rivals such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. Shares are down more than 40% over the past year.

New CEO Enrique Lores, who took over in March after the board grew impatient with the pace of change under predecessor Alex Chriss, has since restructured PayPal into three divisions — checkout, consumer financial services and Venmo, and payments and crypto — while pushing to cut about 20% of the workforce (roughly 4,760 jobs) over the next two to three years. The plan is expected to save at least $1.5bn annually, with AI integration a key part of trimming duplication.

Despite the turmoil, the underlying business is still sizable. PayPal reported $8.35bn in first-quarter revenue and about $464bn in total payment volume, up 8% year-over-year adjusted for currency.

Industry analysts see real strategic logic behind the pairing.

Chris Jones, managing director at PSE Consulting, noted the deal would unite PayPal’s consumer-facing wallet — 440 million active accounts and $1.8 trillion in 2025 volume — with Stripe’s merchant-facing infrastructure, which processed $1.9tn over the same period, roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Combined, the two would handle close to $3.7tn a year, putting the group in the same league as the newly merged Global Payments and Worldpay.

Jones pointed to potential synergies between PayPal’s wallet and Stripe’s Link checkout product, which already has more than 200 million user accounts, as well as opportunities tied to Stripe’s stablecoin push through its acquisition of Bridge. He also flagged risks, particularly overlap between Stripe’s core gateway and PayPal’s Braintree unit, and the challenge of merging Stripe’s engineering culture into a much larger, more complex organisation. He described the potential combination as the boldest reshaping of the eCommerce landscape in a decade.

The deal remains non-binding and would need to clear negotiations, financing, and regulatory review. PayPal’s next earnings report, due July 28, is expected to shed more light on the company’s standalone outlook.

Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, added: “After years of miserable share price performance, it looks like PayPal could be put out of its misery as a standalone company.

“The payments sector has long been a hive of takeover activity, and one must wonder why PayPal hasn’t already been picked off. Spun out of Ebay, the payments group was merrily on its way to greatness when suddenly Apple Pay and Google Pay took off and grabbed some of PayPal’s market share.

“PayPal has tried many things to fight back but has been left behind in a busy market that has also seen the likes of Stripe, Block and Adyen become credible challengers.

“The pandemic triggered an e-commerce boom as people were stuck at home in lockdown and bought items online to relieve their boredom. PayPal enjoyed a purple patch, but it didn’t last.

“If the bid rumours are true, Stripe and Advent obviously see an opportunity to buy a company that’s down but not out.

“The brand still has considerable trust among the public and business community, and it makes a decent profit. It is plugged into many of the hot payment themes including mobile payments, digital wallets and buy now, pay later. For Stripe, it provides a consumer-facing brand.

“Importantly, PayPal is dirt cheap. At its peak, the shares traded on more than 60 times earnings. They’re now on less than nine times which is the sort of rating that’s rarer than hen’s teeth in the payments sector.”