Microsoft’s James Phillips to Become Stripe’s President of Financial Services

Financial infrastructure platform Stripe announced Friday (April 15) in a company blog post that James Phillips will become its new president of financial services.

Phillips had previously worked with Microsoft and became the president of the Digital Transformation Platform Group, helping to scale what originally began as a 200-person business intelligence product team. Later, the Group grew to include over 15,000 employees developing various products across six continents, according to the announcement.

Phillips has also led some startups in the past, including Couchbase, a NoSQL company.

“The economy is undergoing a fundamental shift, as organizations adapt their business models to fully take advantage of software, mobile, machine learning, and the internet: companies are building stronger relationships with their consumers, expanding internationally, distributing financial services, and automating their supply chains,” Phillips said in the announcement.

“Stripe is ideally positioned to serve as the engine behind these opportunities,” he continued. “I look forward to working alongside the entire financial services team as we continue to build out Stripe’s platform for the decades ahead.”

The blog noted that Stripe is currently expanding its work, having launched Stripe Capital, Treasury, Billing and Issuing services. The company has also taken on a speedier approach to debuting new products like Payment Links, Tax, Revenue Recognition and Identity as of late.

In the announcement, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison cited Phillips’ “rare mix of experience as a software engineer, repeat entrepreneur, and experienced enterprise leader” as reasons why he was a good pick for the role.

PYMNTS wrote that Stripe has recently been analyzing its finances, coming out of 2021 in a strong position — but also warning that things might not match that this year.

Read more: Stripe Reports Strong 2021 Growth, Warns It Won’t Be Repeated

The company had a 60% increase in payment handling over the prior year, but because of the fact that this came from the pandemic’s abnormalities, it’s unlikely to happen again. As the company doesn’t provide financial statements publicly, its letter about the comparison was the most that was released.

Stripe said the growth had partially come from adding 1,400 companies and nonprofits as customers, with over 100 clients a day on average surpassing the $1 million in processed-sales mark in 2021.