Open Finance Company MX Adds PayPal’s Wes Hummel as CTO

Open finance company MX has named Wes Hummel, who most recently served as PayPal’s vice president, site reliability and cloud engineering, as chief technology officer (CTO).

In his new position, Hummel will oversee MX’s engineering and information security teams, according to a Wednesday (Aug. 24) press release.

He will report to MX CEO Jim Magats, who moved from PayPal to MX on Aug. 17.

Read more: PayPal’s Jim Magats Named CEO of MX

“I’ve worked alongside Wes for more than a decade developing financial products that deliver better outcomes for businesses and consumers,” Magats said in the release. “He is a proven technology leader with a passion for people development and fostering strong cultures that execute at the highest level.”

Hummel has been building global engineering teams at technology and FinTech companies for more than 25 years, including 14 years at PayPal, eight years at Clarity Communication Systems and five years at Motorola, according to the press release.

“I am thrilled to be joining Jim and the entire MX team in building the infrastructure to power the open finance economy and bringing together financial institutions and [FinTechs] to drive better customer outcomes and experiences,” Hummel said in the release.

MX combines open finance application programming interfaces (APIs) with financial data to verify data for use cases such as account opening, money movement and underwriting, per the press release.

In one recent development, consumer-to-business (C2B) payments firm Sionic announced in July that it was partnering with MX to help link consumer bank accounts and enable Sionic’s Pay-by-Bank services across the U.S.

Read more: Sionic, MX Partner Team on Consumer Bank Payments

Sionic Director of Product Justin Turner said at the time in a press release, “After researching a variety of companies’ offerings, MX was the clear winner. The overall feature set, ease of implementation and its ability to support our pace of development really set MX apart.”