Top PayPal Executive Hill Ferguson Out in Management Shake-Up

PayPal is adjusting its course on a major restructuring it made earlier this year, and its product and engineering boss for its consumer business is leaving as a result.

Hill Ferguson, a top executive and officer who was SVP of PayPal’s consumer business, has stepped down, he announced in a post on Facebook earlier today. Bill Ready, who was Ferguson’s counterpart for the merchant side of PayPal’s ecosystem, is gaining more control and will now run product and engineering for the entire company, a spokesman said in a statement.

The consolidation of power under Ready is a reversal of a move PayPal CEO Dan Schulman made earlier this year ahead of the company’s spinoff from parent company eBay. At that time, he divvied up product and engineering responsibilities between Ferguson, the company’s former chief product officer, and Ready, the former CEO of Braintree who joined PayPal when his company was acquired for $800 million. With this move, the restructuring of the product and engineering organizations into separate consumer and merchant divisions isn’t changing, but both divisions will now report into Ready.

“We thank [Ferguson] for his integrity, commitment and leadership in building amazing products and pushing our teams to always put the customer first in everything they do,” the statement said. “Hill helped put the building blocks in place for PayPal to realize its potential in payments and beyond.”

In the Facebook post, Ferguson said, “PayPal is in unquestionably better shape today than it was four years ago thanks to the hard work and dedication of too many people to name, and I’m looking forward to watching that momentum build in the coming years. As for me, I’m looking forward to coaching/winning soccer, pee wee football and my next mountain to climb.”

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ferguson joined PayPal in 2011 when it acquired mobile payments company Zong, where he was an executive. Zong founder David Marcus later became PayPal’s president and elevated Ferguson to chief product officer before departing in 2014 to run Facebook’s Messenger service. Marcus left a comment under Ferguson’s announcement on Facebook on Monday.

“Very few people fully understand how hard that transformation was, and there’s no way it could’ve happened without you. Onward!”

Marcus will be speaking at our Code/Mobile event on Oct. 7-8 in Half Moon Bay, Calif. Sign up now!

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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