SoFi Tech Solutions’ New President Is Building the AWS of Finance

Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, a former Visa executive, has taken the helm as the new president of SoFi Technology Solutions. Her strategy is based on the premise that banks, credit unions, and software platforms each possess unique customer knowledge, and SoFi can provide the necessary financial technology to act on this knowledge. Pierce-Gilmore aims to serve as the "AWS of financial solutions," offering a range of technology options for various customer needs.

These include account and ledger capabilities, debit, credit and prepaid processing, lending through Peach, money movement, fraud, and disputes.

Pierce-Gilmore categorizes prospective clients into two groups: community banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions, and companies whose primary business is something else but whose customer relationships can provide useful context for financial services. The latter includes vertical software providers, such as a hairdresser's software that tracks appointments, prices, repeat customers, employees, and capacity.

This context can inform repayment and forecasting, enabling the provider to serve the business with information that conventional financial providers may not have.

Pierce-Gilmore's approach acknowledges that different customer relationships yield different information and thus require different underlying technology for financial products. This strategy considers long-term partnerships and the ability to support clients as they grow and evolve. She has also gained firsthand insight into the challenges faced by financial institutions during modernization and core conversion processes.

SoFi Technology Solutions aims to incorporate these learnings into its own migration and compliance capabilities.

Consumer behavior is shifting, with debit usage expanding across a broader range of purchases and card-on-file accounting for 25% of transactions and over 30% of debit dollars on the platform. This change highlights the need for providers to support multiple ways for consumers to use the same underlying account. Artificial intelligence agents may also introduce new variations in debit usage without requiring additional payments architectures.