Barely three months since taking over the top spot at PayPal Holdings Inc., Enrique Lores is heading up a reorganization of the venerable payments company.

Announced late Wednesday following a CNBC report earlier in the day, PayPal says it will migrate to a three-business operating model. The three are checkout and PayPal, consumer financial services and Venmo, and crypto and payment services.

Lores says the reorganization is part of a plan to “recommit to our fundamentals” and get closer to consumers. Lores was chief executive at computer giant HP Inc. for six years before coming to PayPal.

The Venmo unit will tap into Venmo’s momentum, Lores says, and expand into a broader consumer financial-services platform. The PayPal unit will bring the consumer and merchant ecosystems under what he calls a unified strategy, while the crypto and payment-services component will bring operations like Braintree, which PayPal acquired in 2013, small-business processing, and cryptocurrency efforts under one roof. PayPal acquired Venmo with its Braintree acquisition.

These moves come as PayPal still has strong assets to use.

“PayPal still has a stable of strong assets, but many of those assets no longer clearly translate into value for either their merchants or consumers,” says James Wester, co-head of payments and research director for technology and infrastructure at Javelin Strategy & Research.

“What’s more, the payments market is increasingly competitive, so any value needs to be better than what consumers and merchants can find elsewhere,” Wester says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “Giving the reorganized units clearer mandates should help with that, but the new structure will need to lead to better product decisions. A focus on trust, simplicity, and good products were what made PayPal so important to begin with. Any reorganization should be judged by whether it helps PayPal get back to that mindset.”

The reorganization also is an admission of what the market has known for years, says Stewart Watterson, strategic advisor at Datos Insights, that running checkout, Venmo, and payments infrastructure under one undifferentiated roof was limiting all three.

The new structure gives each business a clear identity and someone accountable for it. “Venmo finally gets a real shot at becoming a consumer financial services platform,” Watterson says. “The crypto unit gets a credible infrastructure frame rather than a marketing badge.”

In its Feb. 3 fourth-quarter earnings call, led by then interim chief executive Jamie S. Miller, PayPal cited Venmo as a product that was doing well. Not including interest income, Venmo’s 2025 revenue reached $1.7 billion, a 20% increase from 2024, Miller said.

PayPal also noted its enterprise-payments business had seven consecutive quarters of profitable growth and its buy now, pay later product generated more than $40 billion in total payment volume last year, another 20% increase.

PayPal’s online branded-checkout efforts, which launched in 2023 under then CEO Alex Chriss, were too optimistic, Miller said. “We’ve reimagined a product that had been stagnant and underinvested in for years, creating a new value proposition for merchants and consumers. But we were too optimistic about how quickly we could drive change and customer adoption across a massive global user base. The results are not yet where we expected them or want them to be,” Miller said, according to a transcript provided by PayPal.

PayPal also made several personnel moves Wednesday. Heading checkout solutions and PayPal is Frank Keller, who had been general manager of its large enterprise and merchant-platform group. Alexis Sowa, listed as senior vice president and general manager of Venmo on her LinkedIn profile, will lead the Venmo and consumer financial services line on an interim basis. Jeff Pomeroy will be the interim head of the payment services and crypto business.

PayPal also appointed Anshu Bhardwaj, whose LinkedIn profile listed her as senior vice president of PayPal engineering, to the chief AI transformation and simplification officer role. Antonio Lucio, whose LinkedIn profile listed a previous position of executive vice president, chief of marketing, and corporate affairs officer at HP Inc., joins PayPal as chief marketing and corporate affairs officer.