Walnut Creek, California (PRWEB) April 05, 2017
YapStone, a global provider of online and mobile payment solutions for global marketplaces and large vertical markets, announces the strategic hire of Sanjay Saraf, former CTO of Western Union Digital, as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. In his role, Saraf will lead YapStone’s technology organization and manage product engineering, infrastructure and operations, information security, research, development, and innovation as the company expands its digital payments product platform to power online marketplaces globally.
Prior to YapStone, Saraf was Chief Technology Officer at Western Union Digital where he led product engineering focused on digital transformation. In his tenure at Western Union, Saraf built a new digital product engineering organization from the ground up in San Francisco and oversaw technology strategy and development of digital platforms. As the lead, Saraf’s teams built a platform to power global P2P money transfer products delivering billions in payment volume in over 200 countries. He led development of a number of major initiatives for the company, including a complex, proprietary fraud management system, a digital payments platform to support major global funding methods, a global payout platform to connect over 2 billion bank accounts and digital wallets, a massive Hadoop big data platform, and consumer-facing web and mobile apps in over 50 countries. Saraf was also instrumental in leading Western Union’s Omni-Channel product development (digital kiosks and mobile apps for retail locations) and new product innovation, including Blockchain technologies and API platforms for integrating financial services into social media and messaging platforms.
As YapStone’s Chief Technology Officer, Saraf joins a world-class management team with proven experience and expertise in the payments industry. “The YapStone team has delivered phenomenal revenue growth and product innovation for our partners over the past few years,” says Tom Villante, YapStone’s Chairman, Co-founder and CEO. “To continue to serve our global marketplace and software partners, it is vital to have a next generation CTO at the helm. With his immense experience and success in building innovative platforms on a global scale, Sanjay is certainly one of our most important executive leadership hires as we expand our team and operations.”
YapStone has received several accolades for its recent growth, including being named to the Forbes’ 2016 list of Next Billion Dollar Startups, as well as named a “Fintech company to watch” in Entrepreneur Magazine.
“The Fintech industry is still on the cusp of what is possible, and I share YapStone’s vision of what can be accomplished in this space,” says Saraf. “As the digital sharing economy continues its rapid global expansion via peer-to-peer marketplaces, YapStone is well-positioned to deliver a truly value-add payments platform meeting the needs of marketplace companies. 2017 is going to be an exciting year for our team as we plan to expand in international markets and power several new verticals.”
For more information, visit http://www.YapStone.com
About YapStone
YapStone is a global provider of online and mobile payment solutions for global marketplaces and large vertical markets. YapStone powers electronic payments for sharing economy marketplaces, such as HomeAway® and VRBO®, and thousands of apartment and vacation rental companies, homeowners’ associations, self-storage companies, and hospitality establishments. YapStone processes over $18B in payment volume annually and has been recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies for nine consecutive years and named to the Forbes’ Lists of America’s Most Promising Companies (2015) and Next Billion Dollar Startups (2016). YapStone has raised over $110 million from investors including Accel Partners, Meritech Capital and Bregal Sagemount. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area, YapStone has additional offices in Santa Monica, California, and Austin, Texas, with its European operations in Drogheda, Ireland.
