October 4, 2021
This story is part of Protocol's special report, "Buy now. Pay later. Win the future."
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A former J.P. Morgan analyst, Giesecke joined the Swedish "buy now, pay later" startup as a finance vice president in 2017. She was promoted to chief financial officer in just a few months. In March, she assumed the role of chief expansion officer, shortly before Klarna announced it raised $639 million to spread its services around the world. Klarna has made key acquisitions since Giesecke joined the leadership team, including Moneymour, an Italian "buy now, pay later" firm, and Hero, a U.K.-based ecommerce software company.
Now at Square, Henry is a veteran of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. She's now the head of Square's Seller Business Unit, which has gone from just providing point-of-sale payments to invoicing, payroll, ecommerce and more. When the Afterpay deal closes, all the seller-facing aspects of Afterpay will come under her purview — as well as delivering on the larger strategic promise that "buy now, pay later" will knit Square's disparate business units more closely together.
Rampell was a co-founder of Affirm as well other startups such as TrialPay, FraudEliminator and Point before he became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. His threads on Twitter are must-read analyses of the industry, from "buy now, pay later's" potential to become a new network competing with credit cards to why taking down legacy payment networks is so hard . He's also led a16z's investments in Opendoor, Plaid and Quantopian.
Nejatian joined Shopify in 2019 and became the Canadian ecommerce service's point man in embracing "buy now, pay later." He worked directly with Affirm CEO Max Levchin in a big rollout in June, when that company's pay-later service became available to more than 430,000 Shopify merchants in the U.S. That's only a quarter of Shopify's total merchants, though — so Nejatian holds the keys to a major potential expansion.
A former J.P. Morgan and LendingClub exec, Suarez heads one of Latin America's hottest "buy now, pay later" startups. Addi recently raised funding from Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz and others. The Bogota- and Sao Paulo-based company offers no-interest purchases for three months and interest-bearing installment plans for longer time frames. Addi is available online and in stores in Brazil and Colombia, with plans to enter Mexico.
Bowman is a veteran of the payments industry who served as head of payments at Square before joining Visa in 2019 as head of seller solutions. She joined the payments giant at a time when Visa was adapting to big industry changes, led by what Bowman described as a big shift "from traditional payment acceptance to digital, cross-channel payment experiences," including "buy now, pay later." In August, she helped spearhead the rollout of Visa Installments, which lets issuing banks offer installment payment plans to their cardholders.
Talmor joined Splitit in 2013 as the Israeli "buy now, pay later" company's first employee. She served in key customer relations roles before being named chief customer officer in February 2020. Splitit has been expanding its base of merchants and customers. The number of shoppers doubled in 2020 to 432,000, while the number of merchants using Splitit rose to 1,800. But it hasn't been without controversy: Splitit charges installments to existing credit and debit cards, and Capital One has blocked the use of its cards for such payments.
The Nigerian digital bank Dozie runs offers "buy now, pay later" plans as well as other financial services. He's a former venture capitalist at Kaizen Venture Partners and investment associate at Zephyr Management who sourced and worked with companies in Africa. Previously, he was an investment analyst at the International Finance Corporation. Dozie's company is also known for publicly releasing its financials, a relative rarity among startups.
Samet was previously chief risk officer at Klarna, which positioned him well to start TrueAccord, a debt collection agency used by his former employer and the other major "buy now, pay later" players. TrueAccord's software is designed to get higher collection rates using machine learning and other tools. Samet previously worked at PayPal in fraud prevention and was co-founder of Analyzd, which he sold to Klarna.
Aikat is a Mastercard veteran who recently took on a new role as executive vice president of products and innovation. That makes him the company's point man for "buy now, pay later" in North America. Late last month, he spearheaded the rollout of Mastercard Installments , which promises to allow banks, lenders, fintechs and wallet providers to offer installment payment options.
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