PayPal elevates crypto to a standalone division in a bold three-unit restructure under a new CEO

PayPal Holdings recently broke its business into three separate units. The move, pushed by new CEO Enrique Lores, aims to make the company faster, clearer on who owns what, and better at pushing new ideas while growth has slowed and rivals keep coming hard.

Lores took over as President and CEO on March 1, 2026. He joined PayPal’s board years earlier and ran HP before that, where he focused on cutting complexity and getting things done. His main point so far: simplify how teams work, hold people more accountable, and get back to basics with merchants and consumers.

Instead of the old overlapping setup, PayPal will now run three focused parts:

• Checkout Solutions & PayPal: This covers the main PayPal wallet and the “Pay with PayPal” button that merchants use. Frank Keller will lead it. The goal is to tighten up the core checkout experience and fight harder for e-commerce volume.
• Consumer Financial Services & Venmo: Venmo gets its own unit. The app has a big, young user base built around easy peer-to-peer transfers. Giving it a separate space should let the team build out more financial features like credit or banking tools without always competing with the main PayPal side. Alexis Sowa is the interim lead. Some people think this could eventually lead to spinning Venmo off or giving it more independence.
• Payment Services & Crypto: This is the headline change. It pulls together Braintree (the developer-friendly payments gateway), small and medium business processing, other platform services, and all the crypto work, including PayPal’s own stablecoin, PYUSD. Jeff Pomeroy is taking the interim lead.

By making this a full standalone unit, PayPal is no longer treating crypto and merchant infrastructure as side experiments. It now operates alongside the core business with its own targets and resources.

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PayPal is cutting bureaucracy and sharpening accountability

Over the years PayPal added products and bought companies like Braintree and Venmo. That created layers where decisions got slow and it wasn’t always obvious who should be blamed or praised for results.

The new structure gives each unit its own clear profit-and-loss responsibility. Leaders get dedicated teams and budgets. The crypto and payments infrastructure team can now move more quickly on initiatives like linking Braintree’s tools to PYUSD to enable cheaper, faster settlements for merchants. They won’t have to battle for priority against consumer apps constantly.

Lores wants tighter execution. Fewer approval layers usually mean faster product updates and better responses when competitors launch something new, whether it’s real-time payments or embedded finance options.

Why this matters for growth and innovation

PayPal’s numbers have cooled off. Revenue growth slowed in 2025, especially in the high-margin branded checkout business. Online transaction growth dropped to low single digits in some quarters, while e-commerce softened in key markets and competition heated up from Apple Pay, Google Pay, BNPL players, and newer processors.

Putting crypto into its own unit sends a direct message: blockchain is not a hobby anymore. PYUSD gives merchants and users a stable way to move money with potentially lower costs and faster settlement than traditional rails. Combined with Braintree and SMB tools, it could open doors for better cross-border payments, programmable features, or on-chain services that traditional systems struggle with.

Instead of crypto getting deprioritised when budgets tighten, it now has its own leadership focused on turning it into real revenue. This could help PayPal move beyond just being a familiar checkout button and become a deeper infrastructure that merchants actually need in a world with more digital assets and tokenised payments.

Venmo’s separation should also let that team try things that fit its social, younger crowd without slowing down the main business.

However, it is important to note that changes like this always carry bumps. Several top roles started as interim, which can create confusion in the short term. Going deeper into crypto also means dealing with regulators who are still writing rules for stablecoins.

Splitting teams too cleanly might lose some useful overlap between consumer and merchant sides, so coordination will still matter.

On the investor side, running the units separately should give clearer numbers on how Venmo and the crypto business are really performing. That transparency could help the market value PayPal better, or highlight drags that need fixing.

Whichever way, the signal is clear, Lores is trying to wake the company up. PayPal built a strong position over 25+ years but now faces slower growth and tougher competition. This three-unit split is a practical attempt to reduce drag, make accountability real, and give high-potential areas like crypto infrastructure room to run.

Whether it actually speeds up innovation and lifts results will be shown over the next few quarters. But the direction is clear: PayPal wants to stop defending an ageing core and start betting more aggressively on specialised consumer tools and blockchain-backed merchant services as real growth drivers.