Braintree

Braintree processed $572 billion in payment volume during 2024, yet PayPal CFO Jamie Miller announced a deliberate "value over volume" strategy that slowed unbranded card processing growth from 29% in Q4 2023 to just 2% in Q4 2024. This intentional metabolic restriction mirrors caloric restriction in organisms: short-term growth sacrifice to improve long-term survival through better margins. PayPal expects large merchant renegotiations to create a 5-point headwind to 2025 revenue growth—pain necessary to shed unprofitable biomass.

The company's Q3 2025 return to mid-single-digit volume growth after two quarters of contraction demonstrates controlled calving: PayPal separated Braintree's commodity payment processing (low margin, high volume) from value-added services (fraud prevention, multi-currency support) that command premium pricing. This modular decomposition allows different business units to evolve at different rates—the platform architecture equivalent of body segments that can be shed during predation without killing the organism.

Braintree's 5.21% market share in payment processing positions it as a mesopredator: large enough to matter but small enough that both larger platforms (Stripe's $1.4 trillion in 2024 volume) and smaller specialists threaten from above and below. PayPal's decision to sacrifice volume for margin acknowledges that Braintree can't win a commodity race against Stripe's network effects or Square's vertical integration. Instead, the strategy bets on mutualistic deepening with existing merchants—making separation metabolically expensive through data integration, fraud models, and global infrastructure that commodity providers don't offer.