New PayPal CEO Fast-Tracks Upgrades to Beat Back Competition

New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss is fast-tracking an effort to bolster the company’s defenses against Stripe and Apple Pay, highlighting how the payments giant has fallen behind newer, slicker competitors.

Teams across the payments giant have been racing to add a slew of new features to make its digital wallet and online checkout more attractive for shoppers and merchants, two employees said, part of a project code named Quantum Leap that launched weeks after Chriss joined at the end of September. They’re working on a tight timeline, with a goal of making meaningful progress by January and rolling out the changes widely as early as March, according to an internal document outlining the project.