Fintech Focus — July 2019

Every month we share a curated selection of people moves in fintech. If your colleagues or friends would like to subscribe to our newsletter, we’ve included a subscribe link here, or they can visit our website.

In growth-stage tech, hiring activity often corresponds neatly with capital flows. When a space becomes red-hot, like blockchain was 18 months ago, capital pours into the space and, in turn, exec hiring hits the J curve as investors demand technical founders build out experienced leadership teams.

Interest in Proptech continues to be strong (see Compass’ monster $370m Series G announced this week!), both from generalist venture investors as well as dedicated real estate tech funds such as NYC-based MetaProp and LA-based Fifth Wall. MetaProp is working on its third, $100m fund, and Fifth Wall just closed an oversubscribed $500m fund.

We love seeing the progress that companies like Figure, Lyric, Point, Sonder, Clutter and Irene have been making in upending legacy real estate — an industry that remains (broadly) paper-based and reliant on inefficient information arbitrage. The transformational implications of deploying foundational tech like analytics, AI and blockchain into this space are hard to overstate.

From a hiring perspective, Proptech is a unique beast, and a number of firms have asked us how critical it is to hire candidates with sector-specific knowledge.

The answer, of course, is ‘It depends.’ For CEO/COO hires, having significant knowledge of the competitive landscape as well as relationships with established real estate players is often invaluable. For CFOs, being facile with idiosyncratic and complex financing mechanisms as well as meaningful connectivity to the capital markets is critical. However, for GTM, product and engineering leads, having deep ties to the underlying industry could be less critical.

Needless to say, this is a rapidly evolving market with significant uncertainty, and dramatically impacting an industry which has so far stubbornly resisted disruption will require visionary leadership.

Select Leadership Moves

July 2019

• Andreessen Horowitz: Anish Acharya is joining a16z as a General Partner focused on fintech alongside Angela Strange and Alex Rampell. Anish was previously the VP, Product at Credit Karma. Link
• BAM Trading Services: Catherine Coley joined BAM Trading Services as CEO responsible for rolling out Binance U.S., as well as expanding the exchange’s marketplace in North America. Catherine was previously Head of XRP Institutional Liquidity at Ripple. Link
• Bill.com: James Rauen joined Bill.com as VP, Analytics and Data Science. James was previously Director, Data Science at Uber.
• Cross River Bank: Melissa Ballenger joined Cross River Bank as EVP and Chief Financial Officer. Melissa was previously EVP, Chief Financial Officer of Europe, Middle East and Africa at State Street Corporation. Link
• Discover: Wanji Walcott joined Discover as EVP, Chief Legal Officer and General Council. Wanji was previously SVP, General Counsel at PayPal. Link
• Earnin: We enjoyed partnering with Ram Palaniappan and Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger to recruit Gaurav Bhargava to Earnin as their Chief Risk Officer. Gaurav was previously Head of Credit/Fraud and Data Science at Tala. Sangeetha Raghunathan also joined Earnin as their General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer. Sangeetha was previously VP and General Counsel at Indiegogo.
• Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: Bob Bench joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as Director of Applied FinTech Research. Bob was previously Chief Compliance Officer and Associate General Counsel of Circle. Link
• KKR: Emilia Sherifova joined KKR as Member and Chief Information & Innovation Officer, responsible for driving the firm’s technology and data innovation vision and strategy. Emilia was previously Chief Technology Officer at Northwestern Mutual. Link
• MarketAxess: Richard Prager joined MarketAxess’ board of directors. Richard is a former Senior Managing Director of BlackRock and served on the firm’s Global Executive Committee. Link
• OnDeck: Lonnie Hayes was appointed Head of Sales and Strategy for ODX, a subsidiary of OnDeck that assists banks with streamlining and digitizing small business credit origination. Lonnie was previously EVP & Executive Director, Small Business for BBVA USA. Link
• Revolut: Richard Davies joined Revolut as Chief Operating Officer. Richard was previously TSB’s commercial banking director. Link Martin Gilbert will be Revolut’s first Chairman. Martin was previously the co-CEO of Standard Life Aberdeen. Link David MacLean also joined Revolut as Chief Financial Officer. David was previously a finance director at Metro Bank. Link Martin Sherwood also joined Revolut’s board of directors. Martin was previously the Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Link
• SoFi: Aaron Webster joined SoFi as Chief Risk Officer. Aaron was previously the Chief Risk Officer for Citibank’s U.S. Retail Bank and Mortgage business and led Global Regulatory Analytics. Link
• TCV: Amy Bohutinsky joined TCV as a Venture Partner focused on late stage venture capital investments in consumer tech. Amy was previously the Chief Operating Officer of Zillow and still serves on the board. Link
• TransferWise: Ingo Uytdehaage and David Wells joined TransferWise’s board of directors. Ingo is the CFO at Adyen and will chair the Audit & Risk committee. David is the former CFO at Netflix. Link
• Vestwell: Lori Hardwick and Rana Yared joined Vestwell’s board of directors. Lori is one of the original partners of Envestnet and former BNY Mellon Pershing COO and Rana is a Partner at Goldman Sachs. Link

What We’re Following

• TechCrunch article: Anchorage is on a mission to advance institutional participation in the digital asset class and they just raised $40M led by Blockchain Capital and Visa to do so. Link
• Vanity Fair article: What took you so long? Crypto is here to stay and it’s only getting bigger. Link
• Institutional Investor article: Inside Two Sigma’s $60 billion quant powerhouse. Link
• American Banker article: Varo Money is one step closer to becoming the first true digital only chartered bank in the US. Link

We hope you all have a great end of the summer!
Scott, Hugh and Elizabeth

Intersection Growth Partners is a retained executive search firm that builds the leadership teams transforming financial services. Our clients include challenger fintechs, global financial institutions and leading investors in the space.