PayPal appointed Amit Jhawar as head of its mobile payments service Venmo, its third change in leadership in two years

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Jhawar was promoted to the role of general manager of Venmo in August, after previously heading up PayPal’s Braintree business.

He replaces Kevin Laracey, who also ran PayPal’s Paydiant division which develops technology enabling physical retailers to accept digital payments.

Joanna Lambert headed up Venmo until early 2017, when she became VP of consumer financial services at PayPal. In March, she jumped ship for a position with Verizon media unit Oath.

Unlike his two predecessors, Jhawar’s sole focus will be Venmo, which PayPal COO Bill Ready told WSJ is an indication of “how much its importance has risen inside of PayPal”.

Ready added staff turnover and other challenges are the “growing pains of a rapidly growing start-up”.

Venmo allows users’ to transfer money digitally and has proved popular with consumers, with more than $14 billion in payment volume in Q2. PayPal is now looking at ways to monetise the platform, which WSJ said was a financial drain on the parent because it doesn’t charge users to transfer money.

PayPal has taken steps in recent times to broaden the scope of Venmo and make it into a more mainstream service, enabling the service to be used as a payment method with 2 million online retailers, including Uber.