Stripe and private equity investor Advent International are in talks to purchase PayPal, according to the Wall Street Journal. The companies reportedly offered $60.50 a share for the online payment system in July, which put its value at $53 billion, but it wasn't enough to get PayPal to sell. The Journal says the payment system was trading at historic lows before the proposal and was worth around $40 billion at the time, down around $320 billion from its highest market value back during the height of the COVID pandemic.

While the talks could still collapse, the companies are now discussing a potentially higher price per share and could announce a deal in the coming weeks if everything goes well. In an earlier report about the offer the buyers made, Reuters said Stripe and Advent would each hold an equal stake and would become PayPal's joint owners. They have no plans to break up PayPal, the report said, which would make Stripe one of the largest online payment companies in the world. Reuters said it would be processing around $3.7 trillion in payments a year.

PayPal named a new CEO in March, Enrique Lores, who has been trying to turn the business around. Lores divided the company into three units, with one focusing on checkout, another on Venmo and the last on payments and crypto. It's unclear how the new company structure would be affected by an acquisition, but as Reuters explained, a Stripe-PayPal merger could reduce the former's reliance on Visa and MasterCard. It would also allow stripe to incorporate Venmo, PayPal's checkout system and its crypto features into its own products.