Stripe has poached General Motors chief financial officer Dhivya Suryadevara, and supported its executive team as the San Francisco-based online payments company is driving a wave of e-commerce growth.
Hiring a big-name CFO is often seen as a precursor to an initiative public offering for a fast-growing private company like Stripe, which was valued at $ 36 billion earlier this year.
However, Stripe president John Collison insists he has no “near-term” plans to take the company to public.
“IPO considerations do not fully reflect our reasoning for this lease,” said Mr Collison, who co-founded Stripe with his brother Patrick in 2010. “We do not have a time frame that we are working on what goes public. It is not something on the tickets for Stripe.”
Stripe, which earlier this year ranked alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the most valuable private tech company in the US, has built up its senior team in recent months.
The recruitment of Ms Suryadevara, after what Mr Collison said was an 18-month search, follows last week’s hiring of Mike Clayville, of Amazon’s Web Services unit, as chief revenue officer. Earlier this year, Stripe hired a new general counsel, Trish Walsh, from Voya Financial, the U.S. pension plan provider.
Ms Suryadevara was appointed chief financial officer of GM in 2018 at the age of 39, and became the first female finance manager in the carmaker’s century-long history. GM became one of only two companies in the Fortune 500 with a female CEO and finance boss.
She leaves the Detroit-based business at a critical time. The coronavirus pandemic stretches GM’s finances and forced it to tap into its $ 16 billion credit lines earlier this year, to kiss the company while its factories around the world were closed.
Her move is not the first time a senior finance executive has switched between the auto and technology industries, after Ford appointed former Snap director Tim Stone as its chief financial officer last year.
GM said in a statement on Tuesday that it would conduct an internal and external search for a replacement for Ms Suryadevara. John Stapleton, currently CFO of her company in North America, will take over as CFO on August 15.
GM CEO Mary Barra said: “Dhivya has been a transformation leader during her term as CFO. She has helped the company strengthen our balance sheet, improve our cost structure, focus on cash generation and drive the right investments for our future. We wish them every success. ”
In a previous position as GM’s vice president of corporate finance, Ms Suryadevara played a key role in her 2016 acquisition of Cruise, the autonomous auto startup on which SoftBank subsequently invested, as well as the automaker’s investor in ride-hail company Lyft.
Like that Silicon Valley experience, Mr. Collison said the scope and complexity of Stripe’s business, which now operates under strict financial regulation in 39 countries, also matched well with Ms Suryadevara’s experience with GM.
“Things that may not seem entirely relevant to Stripe at first glance actually seemed to be,” he said, including GM’s large lending business and presence in emerging markets.
Ms Suryadevara will be among about 400 new staff to join Stripe this year as it continues its expansion, despite the uncertainty created by coronavirus.
Stripe’s total payment volumes are growing at a faster rate than at the beginning of the year, Mr Collison said, as acceleration among customers such as Shopify, Zoom and Instacart slowed down the likes of Uber and Booking.com.
Hundreds of thousands of new businesses have signed up for Stripe since March, allowing the company to reach its 2020 customer goals nearly six months early. Nearly $ 10 billion in payments have been processed for those new customers, Stripe said, with total volumes now running up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
When the pandemic spread in April, Stripe raised an additional $ 600 million on the same terms as a round of funding it had announced last September.
Stripe also sought to make its own investments during the pandemic, leading a $ 20 million round of startup online payments Fast and adding to its stake in UK digital bank Monzo.
“Despite the natural tendency of companies to retrench in periods like this, it’s really important to keep expanding, because the need for something like Stripe is even more pronounced,” Mr Collison said.
