Stripe has announced that it has appointed James Phillips as its new president of financial services.

Philips joins Stripe after working with Microsoft for more than a decade. He was a corporate VP for eight years with the tech giant, before he became the president of its digital transformation platform group in 2020.

Philips helped grow this platform group to 15,000 employees, developing products across six continents and generating more than $15bn in annual revenue.

In 2004, Philips was a co-founder and CEO of software company Akimbi Systems, which was acquired by VMware in 2006. He was also a co-founder and CEO of Couchbase in 2009, which Stripe said was one of the first NoSQL companies.

Philips is currently the strategic director of venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group and a board member of F5, an SaaS-based security services company.

Speaking on his appointment, Philips said the economy is undergoing a “fundamental shift”, as companies take advantage of things like new software, machine learning and the internet.

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

Stripe, founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, has been rolling out more services that go beyond the payments processing it was originally built on. This has ranged from tax tools to card issuing services, and it has also become a frequent investor in fintech in recent years.

“James brings a rare mix of experience as a software engineer, repeat entrepreneur, and experienced enterprise leader,” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said. “He drove tremendously impressive product development and innovation at Microsoft.

“More broadly, his empathy for users, from start-ups to the world’s largest companies, will help him as he guides our teams in solving critical business problems for millions of organisations,” Collison added.

Philip’s appointment follows the recent appointments of Dhivya Suryadevara as chief financial officer, Carmel Galvin as chief people officer and Mike Clayville as chief revenue officer.

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