Ripple Taps Facebook Payments Exec for Business Development Role

Ripple has a new senior vice president of business and corporate development.

The San Francisco-based distributed ledger startup announced Wednesday the hire of Kahina Van Dyke, who worked as Facebook's global director of financial services and payments partnerships from the start of 2016 until June of this year.

According to LinkedIn, Van Dyke is also a board director for Progressive Insurance and has served in key roles for Mastercard and Citibank.

In a blog posthttps://ripple.com/insights/welcomes-kahina-van-dyke/ announcing the hire, Van Dyke discussed the pain points around cross-border payments, citing companies like Facebook that have taken steps to ease such issues for domestic transfers.

"Companies like Facebook have improved access to services, digitized payment flows and made it quicker and easier for people to transact with each other domestically. Now we need a new global technology solution for international payments that offers interoperability with existing systems, connecting them and leveraging their value," she remarked, adding:

"We are at the very tip of where this whole thing is going."

Van Dyke's hire wasn't the only personnel-related announcement out of Ripple on Wednesday.

The company also announcedhttps://ripple.com/insights/two-big-changes-leadership-team/ that its chief cryptographer, David Schwartz, has been appointed as its chief technology officer.

"As CTO, I'll get to lead a world-class group of engineers, scientists and business executives, which is what makes coming to work every day so exciting. I'm looking forward to the challenge," Schwartz said in a statement.

Ripple's previous CTO, Stefan Thomas, departed to found Coil, a smart contracts platform based on Ripple's open-source Codius project.

Image via Ripple Blog