SoFi Tech Solutions’ New President Is Building the AWS of Finance

Watch more: Monday Conversation With SoFi’s Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore

Former Visa executive Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore is three months into her new role as president of SoFi Technology Solutions. The premise guiding her strategy is that banks, credit unions and software platforms each know their customers in different ways, and SoFi can provide the financial technology to help them act on that knowledge.

For example, a community bank, credit union or software platform may have customer knowledge SoFi doesn’t. And SoFi Technology Solutions can provide the accounts, payments, lending and money-movement infrastructure behind the financial products they offer.

In short: apply a range of technology to different customer needs. Pierce-Gilmore discussed that approach in her first official interview in her new role, joining PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster for a Monday Conversation. Her shorthand for the model is to serve as she put it, as the “AWS of financial solutions.”

The analogy reflects that range SoFi has assembled. The company spans account and ledger capabilities, debit, credit and prepaid processing, lending through Peach, money movement including ACH, FedNow and wires, and functions such as fraud and disputes. Pierce-Gilmore’s objective is to make those capabilities usable in different combinations depending on what a client is trying to provide.

“Anytime someone is creating a financial solution, it is just a matter of putting certain ingredients together,” Pierce-Gilmore told Webster. The strategy depends in part on which customers need those ingredients and what they’re trying to build.

Pierce-Gilmore divides prospective customers into two broad groups. Community banks, credit unions and other financial institutions have financial services at the center of the customer relationship. A second group includes companies whose primary business is something else but whose relationship with customers can create a useful context for providing financial services.

A vertical software provider illustrates the difference. Pierce-Gilmore cited software used by her hairdresser that can see appointments, prices, repeat customers, employees and capacity. Those operating data can inform more than the initial decision to extend working capital. Pierce-Gilmore said the same context can inform repayment and forecasting, allowing the provider to serve the business with information a conventional financial provider may not have.

Banks and credit unions bring different advantages. A community bank may understand a particular geography and its businesses. A credit union may know members through an employer, profession or affinity. Pierce-Gilmore’s distinction isn’t about which model has better information. It is about recognizing that different customer relationships produce different information and therefore different requirements from the technology underneath the financial product.

That thinking is also informed by a recent setback.

SoFi’s Technology Platform business declined 23% year over year in the second quarter after losing a large client. Pierce-Gilmore said the client had made financial services central to its own business and eventually decided to build internally much of the technology it had previously obtained from SoFi.

“It did leave a hole,” she said.

Pierce-Gilmore said the experience has influenced how she thinks about customer segments. She wants clients whose need for outside technology can endure as they become larger and more sophisticated.

“We want to work with clients where it’s a very long-term partnership, where we can continue to support them as they grow and evolve,” she said.

Seeing the Technology From the Client Side

Pierce-Gilmore’s new role has also changed her vantage point on a problem she encountered throughout her career: financial institutions can decide to modernize and still struggle with the execution.

SoFi is going through its own core conversion. Pierce-Gilmore now sits in internal meetings where product, technology and management teams are dealing with migration and regulatory requirements rather than seeing those issues only from the provider side.

“I get to be in the room when the client is going through this experience,” she told Webster. Pierce-Gilmore said SoFi Technology Solutions can incorporate what it learns into its own migration and compliance capabilities.

“Even when you have the courage and you are taking brave steps forward and you’re taking those risks, it’s really freaking hard,” Pierce-Gilmore said. “It’s complex. There’s a lot of pressures.”

Webster asked how that experience changes Pierce-Gilmore’s responsibility for enabling not only SoFi but partners that want to provide financial capabilities within their own ecosystems.

The answer is showing up in practical requirements around migration, compliance and implementation.

Consumer behavior is changing the requirements as well.

SoFi Technology Solutions’ Q2 debit data point to consumers using debit across a wider range of purchases rather than separating debit and credit by category. Card-on-file represents 25% of transactions and more than 30% of debit dollars on the platform. The numbers point to another change in debit: more spending can originate from the account without the consumer making a fresh decision to present the card for every purchase.

Webster noted that debit itself now includes features that can alter how consumers use it, including rewards and the ability to pay over time.

Pierce-Gilmore puts those developments within a broader financial-health framework of “spending less than you make and investing the rest.” For providers, however, the immediate challenge is supporting more ways for consumers to use the same underlying account.

Artificial intelligence agents could add another variation.

Pierce-Gilmore doesn’t expect agentic commerce to require a separate payments architecture. She does expect existing systems to distinguish between transactions initiated by people and those initiated on their behalf by agents. Credentials, fraud controls and disputes are among the areas that could be affected.

Disputes provide a concrete example. Evidence used to resolve a claim today can include what a consumer ordered, what a merchant delivered and records surrounding the transaction. Delegating the purchase to an AI agent changes the record of who made which decision.

“When it’s an agent, it’s a different kind of evidence,” Pierce-Gilmore said.

Pierce-Gilmore expects the next six to 12 months to begin showing whether the pieces she calls financial “ingredients” can work as the broader platform she envisions. She wants live examples of clients using combinations of SoFi Technology Solutions’ capabilities to serve customers they already know.

Watch the full interview with Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore to learn more about:

How customer data held by software platforms can inform financial products for small businesses.

What SoFi’s own core conversion is teaching its technology business about migration and compliance.

Why AI agents could require changes to credentials, fraud controls and dispute evidence.