Stash’s new CMO, Jackie Stern on building big partnerships and the importance of simplifying products and communications in finance
- As investment service Stash matures, it's made a series of key hires in the C-suite.
- CMO Jackie Stern joins Stash as the firm works to scale its username, expand its product sets, and move into the next stage of its growth.
As we explore financial services together with an eye on technology, innovation, emerging models, and changing expectations, investing service Stash provides a case study into a fintech that’s found its product set and audience with a business model and unit economics that provide a foundation for future growth.
As an investing service, Stash charges users $3 or $9 a month, depending on which services and account types they request. It has a robo-advisor as well as the Stock-Back card, a debit card that pays out rewards in fractional shares of the stocks of the companies its users shop with.. Stash has roughly 2 million subscribers.
Founder Brandon Krieg brought in new CEO Liza Landsman last year. Now, Landsman is recruiting in a new class of leadership to help propel the firm into the future. There’s a new CFO Steven Hodgeman who hails from Getir, the global delivery service that recently acquired FreshDirect where he was CFO of international, responsible for the U.S. and Europe. There’s a new CTO Chien-Liang Chou who’s joined from Dave and Flexport, and Shannon Allmon, Stash’s new chief experience officer from Venmo and PayPal.
In addition to this new cadre of leaders is a new CMO, Jackie Stern, who joins Liza and her team from E*Trade and Citibank. Landsman and Stern have a longstanding relationship having worked together at two different points in their careers. And it was this connection that lured Stern to join.
“I’m old enough at this point in my life to feel like I want to work with people that I trust, that I know, who I believe will succeed, and who I will have a really good time working with,” Stern said.
Stash’s new CMO will be focused on helping Stash core users – everyday Americans with everyday financial issues – start climbing the investment ladder. She said people don’t really know how to invest and more importantly, they don’t know how to get started. There’s a fear there, and that requires some behavioral change.
To do that, it requires really simplifying financial concepts down to make them more easily digestible to users with little investing experience. Stern credits founder Krieg with creating Stash’s ethos and competence in explaining and demonstrating complicated ideas in a simple, down-to-earth way.
