10 Most Innovative CEOs in Banking 2015, Page 3
8. Dan Schulman, PayPal
Earlier this year, Carl Icahn, the investor-agitator, got his wish: PayPal was unshackled from former parent company eBay through an initial public offering. Waiting patiently to take the reins was CEO-designee and American Express veteran Dan Schulman. Schulman immediately addressed PayPal’s opportunities rather than its challenges, stressing that online commerce represents just a tiny fraction of global commerce. And if all global commerce is PayPal’s addressable market, we “have an infinitesimally small percentage of our market,” he said. “On marketshare, we have 0.4 or 0.5 of 1% of our addressable market. We have an enormous runway and opportunity in front of us.” This wasn’t just IPO-road-show-speak. Just weeks before the IPO in mid July, Schulman announced that PayPal would acquire international remittance player Xoom, its first acquisition with Schulman as CEO. He then surprised audiences at Money20/20 in October by discussing, not the flashy new technology PayPal was developing, but opportunities for financial inclusion in the developing world. It was a stunning revelation to the fintech community that said, Here is a different kind of CEO.
9. Howard Schultz, Starbucks
Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Chase Pay, Walmart Pay — yawn. Mobile payments still belong to Starbucks, the technology company that also happens to sell coffee. Payments by smartphone account for 21% of in-store purchases at Starbucks — a staggering number, considering that Starbucks generated $19.2 billion of revenue during the 12 months ending Sept 30, and nearly 10x the rate mobile payments were used in the general retail world on the most recent Black Friday. “Where others are attempting to build a mobile app, Starbucks has built an end-to-end consumer digital platform anchored around loyalty,” Schultz told investors last October. “This platform enables us to deliver new features faster, create a more integrated experience, and personalize those experiences for the consumer.” Bankers are anxious to reproduce the loyalty Starbucks engenders in its audience — but it’s not exactly a straight line from coffee to mortgages.
10. Jay Sidhu, Customers Bank/BankMobile
Jay Sidhu and his chief marketing and strategy officer, his daughter Luvleen, are trying everything to get millennials to sign up with BankMobile, the mobile bank brand of Customers Bank. What will that take? “No one’s cracked the code yet,” Sidhu told Bank Innovation recently, but he’s trying. And his ambitions are sky high — he wants BankMobile products and services to touch 1 billion users — yes, that’s a billion. Sidhu is aggressively pursuing partnerships with innovative fintech companies, from free stock trading app Robinhood to marketplace lender Biz2Credit. Simple, the original mobile-first banking service, struggled to gain users. Sidhu is confident his bank will meet the challenge. “We have publicly announced that we will have 25,000 users in our first year,” Jay Sidhu said at Bank Innovation Israel last month. “Today, I can say that we will exceed that. We have announced 250,000 users in five years. We will exceed that, too.” When Simple was sold to BBVA in 2014, it had around 33,000 active users, and Simple was launched in 2009. That should tell you something about Sidhu’s plans.
