AGE: 44
FROM: Australia
CHANGEUP: After 13 years at American Express (AXP), Lambert leaped last year to PayPal (PYPL), where she is vice president of global consumer products and chief of one of the company’s biggest hits: Venmo, a payments app that is popular with millennials.
HOT HAND: Venmo, which lets users send cash to one another, processed $4 billion in payments in the most recent quarter, up 140% from the same period a year earlier.
FEEDBACK LOOP: To learn what consumers want, Lambert makes it a point to meet with people outside of the payments world. Most recently, it was a team from a perfume maker. “It’s important to get outside your current frame of reference,” she says.
Read more: PayPal’s OneTouch Expects to Get Millions of New Users Leading Up to Black Friday
TRUSTED MENTOR: A key adviser for Lambert has been Dan Schulman, PayPal’s CEO. While working together previously at AmEx, he urged her to switch from public relations to business strategy and creating products. “I’ve been lucky to have leaders like Schulman take a bet on me.”
ALL IN: She made “a big bet” 10 years ago in moving to New York from Sydney. But “it’s paid off.”
For more on Paypal, watch this Coins2Day video:
A version of this article appears in the October 1, 2016 issue of Coins2Day with the headline “Person of Interest: Jo Lambert — PayPal.”