Franz Paasche

SVP, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, PayPal

Franz Paasche serves as PayPal’s Senior Vice President, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. In this role, Franz is responsible for leading PayPal’s global communications, employee engagement, reputation management, public affairs and strategic research functions. He also oversees PayPal’s global social innovation efforts, working to leverage the company’s core capabilities to deliver meaningful impact at scale for employees, customers and communities.

Franz brings more than 30 years of cross-sector expertise in corporate, government, legal and public affairs domains to his role at PayPal leading stakeholder engagement and building the company’s reputation globally. Before joining PayPal, Franz served as Head of External Relations for North America for McKinsey & Company providing strategic counsel to the firm’s senior leadership and practice leaders. Prior to this, he was a Senior Partner managing the leadership communications practice at Communications Consulting Worldwide, Fleishman Hillard’s multi-disciplinary strategic communications firm. Earlier in his career, Franz held the roles of Managing Director for strategic communications firm Clark & Weinstock; General Counsel and Executive Vice President at the real-time financial information and technology company, Market Data Corporation; and served as a litigator with the international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served on the board of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School since 2018.

Franz earned his JD from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and an editor of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. He graduated from Swarthmore College with High Honors in Political Science, English Literature and American Economic History.