PayPal Holdings (PYPL 0.47%) has long been a loser on Wall Street. In recent years, the company has lost ground and lost much of its share value, but things may be looking up. Is there still a bright future ahead or have you missed the chance to buy this once-successful stock?

PayPal has not yet lost its reputation

More than 400 million people worldwide have a PayPal account. That’s more than the entire population of the United States, plus Canada and several other countries. PayPal is a trusted platform for shopping and digital payments, and no one should think that PayPal is finished.

When growth slowed and the company needed a refresh, hiring a new CEO was the right decision. The company still has its top brand and platform and is making the necessary changes to protect it.

What caught my eye in the recent earnings report was that the number of active accounts remained stable. PayPal was losing accounts for a while. Management had stated that it would abandon less active accounts and focus its resources on the more active customers. This resulted in account churn but higher transaction rates. Maybe that’s the case, but it’s important to keep an eye on these numbers because a company can’t squeeze more transactions out of the same customers forever. It looks like churn has stopped, at least for now.

There was plenty of other positive news. Revenue (at constant currency) increased 9% year over year, beating the 7% forecast, total payment volume (TPV) increased 11%, adjusted operating margin increased 2.3 points to 18.5%, and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) increased 36% to $1.19.

There is still a lot to do

PayPal is an asset-light company. It is primarily based on services, but also offers hardware such as point-of-sale devices. It should have a high gross margin, but look at what has happened to the company in the last few years.

PYPL Gross Profit Margin (Quarterly) – Data by YCharts

Aside from hardware, which doesn’t represent a large portion of PayPal’s business or costs, the “products” PayPal sells are business-to-business services. PayPal’s biggest growth driver in recent years has been its white-label service under the name Braintree, or what PayPal calls “unbranded checkout.” That’s a kind of wholesale business that has brought PayPal lower profits. Braintree’s higher but less profitable sales have weighed on its bottom line.

TPV of branded checkouts, which run under the PayPal name, grew just 5% year over year in the second quarter, accounting for 28% of TPV, while unbranded checkouts grew 28% year over year, accounting for 34%. It’s easy to see what’s going on here. CEO Alex Chriss noted that Braintree is “a meaningful contributor to transaction margin growth in dollar terms for the first time in over two years.” Since joining, Chriss has talked about balancing “price and value,” and he’s worked to correct the unbranded pricing structure to match the value it creates for customers. As the leader in this space, PayPal has pricing power that it hasn’t fully leveraged. It’s paying off.

At the same time, Chriss is tasked with re-igniting growth in the branded checkout space, something he has been working on feverishly since taking over. The company is heavily focused on creating a positive and simplified experience for PayPal users to drive growth.

It’s never too late to buy a great stock

I’m not the only one who welcomed the news from PayPal. PayPal stock has been on the rise since the company released its second-quarter report on July 29. Since then, it’s up 23%.

At that price and with its current trajectory, PayPal seems to be moving in the right direction. There is still a lot of work to do, but the path now seems clearer. Incidentally, the tighter PayPal becomes, the less vulnerable it is to competitors seeping through its cracks and poking them open. Other companies, which may be facing their own challenges, are also returning to their core businesses and may be less focused on gaining ground in PayPal’s territory.

Even though PayPal stock is rising, it’s still down 73% over the past three years. You may have missed the gains from before, but it will continue to rise and looks like a great value stock for long-term investors.