Dive Brief:

• The fintech Plaid has hired Facebook and Cloudflare veteran Jen Taylor to serve as its first president, CEO Zach Perret wrote in a blog post last week.
• The announcement comes less than four months after the data aggregator named Expedia veteran Eric Hart as its first CFO, and less than three months after it appointed Adyen executive Brian Dammeir as its head of Europe.
• Companies often build out their executive ranks ahead of going public. “An eventual IPO is a milestone we’re tracking toward, but we don’t have any details or a timeline to share beyond that,” a Plaid spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Dive Insight:

Plaid’s “eventual” IPO may represent the fruition of an “opportunity” the company has teased since 2021, when Visa abandoned its plan to acquire the data aggregator for $5.3 billion. The termination came amid the Justice Department’s stated intention to block the tie-up.

Since then, Plaid has been valued at $13.4 billion, and broadened its suite to include payment, lending and anti-fraud capabilities, in addition to its signature tech that links consumer bank accounts with financial apps.

“The demand for these new products has been even greater than we anticipated,” Perret said in his blog post. “Jen’s experience scaling products to meet increasing customer demand will be invaluable as we continue to expand our platform to support ongoing innovation in financial services.”

Notably, in Taylor, Plaid gets an executive who worked at Cloudflare before and after its 2019 IPO. (Taylor served as the company’s chief product officer from 2017 until January.)

Going public “requires the organization to really scale up and demonstrate internally the rigor that you need for that type of communication with the public markets and that kind of communication with the broader investment community,” Taylor told Bloomberg. “It sounds like much of that work is already sort of underway.”

Taylor’s role will focus on the research and development of new products at Plaid, she told the wire service. 

“The thing that I have most enjoyed in my career is the opportunity to work with companies that have built networks and competitive moats,” Taylor said. “As Zach started talking me through what the company did and its founding around the network, light bulbs started going off for me as I drew the parallels to the other companies I’ve worked with.”

Before joining Cloudflare, Taylor worked for four years as a product management executive at Salesforce, and spent two years in platform product marketing at Facebook and nine at Adobe, according to her LinkedIn profile.

“Getting to know the [Plaid] team and diving into the work has been exciting, humbling and an incredible learning experience,” Taylor wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Plaid’s obsession with customer outcomes is a real differentiator, and Plaid has the potential to become a critical piece of the financial services industry for generations.”

In his blog post, Perret called Taylor a “phenomenal product leader,” praising her for “intellectual humility centered on an obsession with customer needs.” 

“As digital finance becomes the norm across every industry … this approach will be important in shaping the future of our network,” Perret said.

The Plaid spokesperson said Taylor would “be a critical component of maturing our tech and product strategy as we continue to grow and evolve.”