SoFi Tech Solutions Names Visa Vet Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore President

SoFi hired former Visa executive Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore to serve as president of technology solutions.

Pierce-Gilmore announced the new appointment on her LinkedIn page last week. While acknowledging other personal and professional milestones, Pierce-Gilmore said the role “feels particularly special” for her.

“I now work for a company with the sole mission to help people reach financial independence to realize their ambitions,” she said.

Pierce-Gilmore is joining SoFi following three years at Visa, where she served as senior vice president of issuer solutions. She has also held executive roles at PayPal, Capital One, Silicon Valley Bank and American Express, according to her LinkedIn page.

In April, she spoke with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster about legacy core systems, which are still critical for banks but slow innovation and complicate artificial intelligence adoption. Pierce-Gilmore said modular infrastructure is helping issuers modernize while managing regulatory and operational risk.

“If you don’t have well-understood, well-managed, well-governed data, it’s going to be really hard to use AI,” she said.

In many banks, data is broken up across systems, hindering real-time use. Pierce-Gilmore called these silos “data prisons,” where information is locked inside infrastructure and cannot easily be deployed for analytics, personalization or compliance.

In other SoFi news, the company announced last week that its U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, SoFiUSD, is now available for its nearly 15 million members to buy, sell, hold and convert by using the SoFi app.

The offering is designed to improve money movement by merging the speed and versatility of the blockchain with the trust of a bank, SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in a news release.

SoFi’s announcement was part of a wave of developments last week that showed that stablecoin technology is functioning as advertised, PYMNTS reported.

“But the digital dollar industry is now approaching a more difficult phase of development where success will be measured not by how quickly stablecoins move between wallets but by whether businesses and consumers can use those assets in the real economy without introducing new friction, cost or complexity,” the report said. “The first challenge was proving that value can move on chain. The next challenge is figuring out how that value becomes economically useful once it moves off chain.”