Stripe hires Microsoft veteran to lead financial services business

Stripe has hired Microsoft’s digital transformation chief James Phillips as president of financial services.

Phillips, who led a team of 15,000 in his role as president of Microsoft’s digital transformation platform group will join the B2B payments and financial infrastructure firm as it continues its plans to further expand the business.

At Microsoft, Phillips led what started as a 200-person business intelligence product team that grew to become the digital transformation platform group, with over 15,000 employees developing products across six continents generating over $15 billion in annual revenue.

Stripe also said Phillips brings a strong developer mindset and company builder experience to the company, having previously led three successful startups, including Couchbase, one of the first NoSQL companies.

In recent years, Stripe has launched Capital, Treasury, Billing, and Issuing, among other B2B financial services products. Other launches in the last 12 months include Payment Links, Tax, Revenue Recognition, and Identity.

Commenting on his appointment, Phillips said:“The economy is undergoing a fundamental shift, as organizations adapt their business models to fully take advantage of software, mobile, machine learning, and the internet: companies are building stronger relationships with their consumers, expanding internationally, distributing financial services, and automating their supply chains. Stripe is ideally positioned to serve as the engine behind these opportunities.”

He added:“I look forward to working alongside the entire financial services team as we continue to build out Stripe’s platform for the decades ahead.”

Phillips’ appointment follows the recent addition of Dhivya Suryadevara, previously at GM, as Stripe’s chief financial officer; Carmel Galvin, formerly at Autodesk, as chief people officer; and Mike Clayville, previously at Amazon Web Services, as chief revenue officer.

Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe said:“James brings a rare mix of experience as a software engineer, repeat entrepreneur, and experienced enterprise leader.”

“He drove tremendously impressive product development and innovation at Microsoft. More broadly, his empathy for users, from startups to the world’s largest companies, will help him as he guides our teams in solving critical business problems for millions of organizations.”

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