Dive Brief:

• Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. has promoted two executives closely allied with CEO Stefano Pessina to be co-chief operating officers, the company said Thursday. Simon Roberts, EVP of Walgreens Boots Alliance and president of Boots, will leave next month to pursue new opportunities, according to a press release. 

• Alex Gourlay, president of Walgreens, will oversee Walgreens and the retailer's U.K operations under Boots. Ornella Barra, previously president/CEO of the merged company’s global wholesale business and international retail, will maintain her responsibilities while also supervising global brands, human resources and other business services. 

• As part of the shift, Ken Murphy becomes EVP of Walgreens Boots Alliance and chief commercial officer/president of global brands, and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson becomes EVP and global chief human resources officer, reporting to Barra. 

Dive Insight:

These shifts are part of the power consolidation destined to occur once it became clear that Pessina would be CEO of the merged Walgreens and Boots drugstore retailers.

Barra, an Italian pharmacy entrepreneur in her own right (whose company Pessina bought in the 1980s), has also been his "life partner" for decades. And Gourley, described by Fortune as a “boots lifer,” and Murphy, at Boots for nearly two decades, are also close associates. In fact, Bruce Japsen at Forbes speculates that the team arrangement constitutes a succession plan by Pessina, who is 74. 

Walgreens is awaiting permission to close on its agreement to acquire rival Rite Aid, which would consolidate the second and third largest drugstore chains in the U.S.—a Pessina-Led move. That’s hardly a done deal, though, considering that the Federal Trade Commission is widely seen as demonstrating distaste these days for any whiff of anti-competitive consolidation.

The moves come as a quiet revolution has been building as retailers like drugstores, general merchandise stores, and grocery stores are taking advantage of a new financial picture in healthcare, spurred in part by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. As this revolution grows, customers are starting to see these businesses offer actual medical services in addition to traditional health and beauty products.

Walgreens has worked to differentiate its offerings in the beauty space, too, a traditional part of drugstore retail that has been ceding ground to the likes of Sephora and Ulta, which have many of the same or competitively priced products in addition to premium ones. Walgreens bought U.K. beauty brand Liz Earle from Avon last year. 

“Alex and Ornella will be instrumental in driving the operations of our company in the next phase of its evolution now that our businesses have come successfully together after 18 months of integration,” Pessina said in a statement.