Card issuing platform Marqeta has appointed Randy Kern as Chief Technology Officer, responsible for scaling the global engineering team and driving technological advancements across the company.
The hire of the former SalesForce and Microsoft executive was first disclosed in the firm’s Registration Statement on Form S-1 in connection with its initial public offering.
Jason Gardner, Founder and CEO of Marqeta, said: “Randy brings decades of software engineering experience to Marqeta, and his experience leading development teams and building software products that serve hundreds of thousands of customers will be vital in our next phase of growth. As we continue to evolve our product offerings to meet new kinds of customer demands for payments at massive scale, Randy has the engineering skillset and leadership experience required for us to continue to outpace the competition.”
Randy Kern joins Marqeta from SalesForce, where he held the roles of Chief Customer Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering roles. He was responsible for building out a unified tech infrastructure to support the company’s industry-leading enterprise cloud product.
His career also includes several years at Microsoft, with his most recent role being of Partner Director of Development, where he led development for its Azure Compute team. Kern’s attention went to highly technical engineering projects, working on many of Microsoft’s most popular products, including Bing.
Randy Kern, Chief Technology Officer at Marqeta, commented: “From my first conversation with Jason, I knew Marqeta was a different kind of company. Marqeta is challenging the status quo with a really innovative API-led approach, and I was drawn to a company solving such complex problems. I’m thrilled to be joining Marqeta at this unique time in the company’s journey and look forward to continuing to grow the engineering team.”
Marqeta is a card issuing platform that gives its customers the ability to build more configurable and flexible payment experiences, accelerating time-to-market and democratizing access to card issuing technology.
Marqeta’s open APIs provide instant access to scalable, cloud-based payment infrastructure that enables customers to launch and manage their own card programs, issue cards and authorize and settle payment transactions.
The platform is certified to operate in 36 countries with focused efforts to quickly enter into new growth markets.
The firm has recently partnered with Payfare to combine the latter’s full-service digital banking apps and modern UI, relied upon by some of the largest on-demand platforms in the world to power instant payouts, with Marqeta’s card issuing and payment processing capabilities, offered through its modern, open-API platform. The partnership addresses the gig economy.
