Chime Strengthens C-Suite with Key Leadership Hires

July 23, 2024 at 08:00 AM EDT

Chime Expands Technology Organization with Jeff Currier as Chief Technology Officer, Barkha Saxena as Chief Data Officer and Sarah Wagener as Chief People Officer

Chime®, the #1 Most Loved Banking App¹, today announced the addition of three key executives to its leadership team. The new leadership will help strengthen the company and its product portfolio as Chime continues on its mission to help everyday people unlock financial progress.^TM

Chime has appointed fintech industry veteran Jeff Currier as Chief Technology Officer to lead the Company’s technology organization and innovation initiatives and Barkha Saxena as Chief Data Officer to lead and expand the Company’s data and AI initiatives. Each will report to Chime co-founder Ryan King. These new hires follow the addition of Sarah Wagener to the role of Chief People Officer earlier this year. Wagener previously served as Chief People Officer at DoorDash, and Vice President of Human Resources at Pandora. Wagener also held recruiting leadership roles at Facebook and Genentech.

“As we enter the next chapter of Chime’s technical growth and maturity, we’re focused on strengthening our full technology stack and driving innovative data and AI programs to ensure top-line growth and operational efficiency, all while better serving our members’ most pressing needs at scale,” said Ryan King, Chime co-founder. “Jeff brings great knowledge, perspective, and expertise from his experience leading engineering teams at some of the world’s most innovative tech companies, and we are thrilled to have him leading our engineering organization.”

King continued, “Barkha’s expertise and experience spearheading high impact data organizations will help ingrain a data-driven culture and approach to innovation across our entire organization. At a foundational level, this work will help us stay focused on improving our growth strategy and operational efficiencies, enabling every part of our organization to better serve our members.”

As Chief Technology Officer, Currier will lead Chime’s engineering organization, focusing on building and deploying innovative new products. Currier will partner closely with Madhu Muthukumar, Chime’s Chief Product Officer, to deliver new and enhanced products that enrich the member experience. Currier joins Chime from Galileo Financial Technologies, a SoFi company, where he served as Chief Technology Officer and led the Company’s technical transformation to the cloud. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Engineering at SoFi and also led engineering teams at Amazon Web Services (DynamoDB), Twitter and Microsoft. He also was one of the founding members of Microsoft's Azure team.

As Chief Data Officer, Saxena will lead the Data Engineering, Data Analytics, Data Science and Machine Learning teams at Chime, setting the Company’s vision, strategy and execution for data and AI initiatives. Previously, she served as Global Chief Data Officer at McKinsey, where she spearheaded the development of scalable data platforms and capabilities, orchestrated a comprehensive data strategy, and guided a cross-functional global team on the data strategy for the firm's first GenAI initiative. Before McKinsey, Saxena was the Chief Data Officer at Poshmark, where she built the Company’s data function and led a comprehensive AI strategy, contributing to the Company’s journey from Series B to a successful IPO.

About Chime

Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank, founded on the premise that basic banking services should be helpful, easy, and free. Chime builds products that allow us to succeed when our customers do and has a business model that doesn’t rely on overdraft, monthly service, or minimum balance fees. For additional information: www.chime.com.

Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by The Bancorp Bank, N.A. or Stride Bank, N.A., Members FDIC.

¹Chime is recommended by more of its users than that of any brand per 2023 Qualtrics® NPS score.