Former Visa executive Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore is three months into her new role as president of SoFi Technology Solutions. The premise guiding her strategy is that banks, credit unions and software platforms each know their customers in different ways, and SoFi can provide the financial technology to help them act on that knowledge.

For example, a community bank, credit union or software platform may have customer knowledge SoFi doesn’t. And SoFi Technology Solutions can provide the accounts, payments, lending and money-movement infrastructure behind the financial products they offer.

In short: apply a range of technology to different customer needs. Pierce-Gilmore discussed that approach in her first official interview in her new role, joining PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster for a Monday Conversation. Her shorthand for the model is to serve as she put it, as the “AWS of financial solutions.”

The analogy reflects that range SoFi has assembled. The company spans account and ledger capabilities, debit, credit and prepaid processing, lending through Peach, money movement including ACH, FedNow and wires, and functions such as fraud and disputes. Pierce-Gilmore’s objective is to make those capabilities usable in different combinations depending on what a client is trying to provide.

“Anytime someone is creating a financial solution, it is just a matter of putting certain ingredients together,” Pierce-Gilmore told Webster. The strategy depends in part on which customers need those ingredients and what they’re trying to build.

Pierce-Gilmore divides prospective customers into two broad groups. Community banks, credit unions and other financial institutions have financial services at the center of the customer relationship.

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