PayPal Tech Radar: Overhauling legacy checkout and deploying agentic AI to drive revenue growth
PayPal's biggest technology story right now is a massive infrastructure modernization effort to replace over a decade of bespoke legacy integrations with a unified, biometric-enabled checkout architecture focused on driving top-line revenue growth.
Executives explicitly confirmed two major technology projects aimed at revenue generation. First, they are untangling "a decade or more of legacy integrations" to scale a modernized checkout experience paired with biometric passkey authentication, which leadership notes drives 2 to 5 points of conversion improvement for merchants. Second, PayPal is building an AI orchestration layer—bolstered by the acquisition of Cymbio—that allows merchants to securely integrate their product catalogs directly with LLMs like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity to power "agentic commerce".
Two major business transformations will logically require heavy implied technology support. PayPal’s push to unify global payment networks through "PayPal World" (connecting Venmo, UPI, WeChat, and Mercado Pago) will demand massive API gateway scaling, cross-border routing infrastructure, and complex identity mapping across distinct global databases. Additionally, their omnichannel expansion moving enterprise payment processing into physical stores via a Verifone partnership points to significant upcoming integration work with Point-of-Sale (POS) systems and offline data synchronization.
All sourced directly from PayPal's Q4 2025 earnings call and 2025 investor conferences.