PayPal brings many brands under individual umbrellas, Venmo remains independent

For Frank Keller, it is a crucial moment in PayPal. After two years, two CEOs and endless brand strategy meetings, the company is, in its opinion, ready to redefine the world of commercial payments.

With the launch this week of PayPal Open, Keller, who is executive vice president of the Merchant Group of Enterprise, and his team is consolidating many of the company’s offers: Braintree, Zettle, Hyperwallet, Chargehound, in a single brand.

Speaking of Germany, Keller told CNBC that the strategy was launched after a client mentioned: “You have all these incredible things, but we don’t know.”

“I have been working, in reality for two years, in this launch, in terms of how we establish a PayPal as a B2B business,” Keller said.

PayPal, founded in 1998, was synonymous with its consumer -oriented payment button, but their company to company solutions have promoted to a variety of own harvest technologies and companies acquired with little cohesion. With open PayPal, those names will fade in the background, and PayPal can focus their centralized effort to be more important for companies.

Keller compares the effort for other consumption brands that successfully expanded to B2B, pointing out Amazon Web services as an excellent example. Meanwhile, much of the early success of the CEO Alex Chriss has emerged from increasing transaction margins and monetizing better key acquisitions such as Braintree, which manages credit card processing for Goal and prosecuted almost $ 600 billion in total payment volume last year.

Landing in the name Open took months of market research, internal deliberations and some last -minute strategic pivots. There was even a debate on whether to focus more on Braintree.

“Paypal is one of the most reliable brands” in the world, Keller said, explaining the logic of the decision.

The pressure is in Chriss, who assumed the position of CEO in September 2023 to orchestrate a change after a few brutal years for Paypal.

The company’s brand payment business, historically its most profitable segment, faces a growing competition. Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shopify’s The payment of the store has eaten the domain of PayPal, particularly among younger consumers who prefer first mobile payment solutions. Brand payment accounts for 30% of PayPal’s total payment volume.

Paypal Open is designed to make much more than handle B2B payments. Companies, developers and partners may also integrate financial services and commercial ideas with AI, during a single connection. For merchants, that means easier access to fraud protection, buy now, pay later options, global transactions in 140 loan currencies and solutions.

There is a remarkable brand that does not bind to consolidation: Venmo.

The popular pairs application has more than 90 million active users, all in the US, and is practically ubiquitous among the youngest public.

“People say: ‘Venmo Me’,” Keller said. “It is such a different consumption mark.”

The launch of PayPal Open begins this week, with a gradual transition from brands from April, which means Braintree and Hyperwallet will not disappear overnight.

Keller said that companies “do not have to tear and replace their Braintree” or other integrations, but obtain access without problems to all PayPal offers. Keller says it’s about showing that Paypal can be a true business power.

“We want to be an open platform where companies, developers and partners can take advantage of our solutions,” Keller said.