PingPong Taps Amex Vet David Messenger as International Business CEO

Cross-border payments company PingPong has named David Messenger to the new position of global CEO.

Messenger, a veteran of companies like American Express and LianLian, will be responsible for PingPong’s push to build payment solutions for businesses expanding internationally, the firm said in a Monday (July 10) news release.

“Over the years, we have admired David’s initiatives to find a market entry for American Express in a new region, and built an online payment business through partnerships,” said Robert Chen, group CEO of PingPong.

“He is a true visionary in our space, being one of the first to identify the emerging opportunities in Asia and made bold moves to accelerate the growth of fintech in Asia,” he said.

Last year, LianLian, under Messenger’s leadership, debuted what it said was the world’s first cross-border payments guarantee to China as part of its digital wallet.

“We have invested in an end-to-end solution, and own all of our payment licenses, to remove all the middlemen and correspondent banks from the transaction process,” he said at the time. “This ownership allows LianLian Global to offer the world’s first cross-border payments guarantee to China at unrivaled speeds and extremely competitive prices.”

In Monday’s announcement, Messenger said the company is poised to tap into “two of the most significant and historical growth opportunities — first is the rapid digitization of cross border businesses, and, second is how collaborative relationships between banks and fintechs are transforming financial services.”

Research in the PYMNTS study “The FinTech-Bank Relationship Shifts Toward Collaboration” backs up the second half of this statement.

That report found that 65% of banks and credit unions have entered into at least one FinTech partnership in the past three years, with 76% of banks seeing FinTech partnerships as necessary to meeting client expectations.

“The new financial services landscape is being reshaped by ongoing partnerships and collaborations that focus on the same end goal: improving the user experience,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

By employing things like application programming interfaces (APIs) and customizable feature sets, collaborations between banks and FinTechs allow firms on both sides of the partnership to enjoy value-add integrations.

Meanwhile, the ongoing digital shift is putting even greater pressure on banks and FinTechs to work together.

“It’s a reevaluation of the question of build versus buy versus partner,” Igor Bazay, head of finance at Enigma, said in an interview with PYMNTS in April. The current environment, he said, is showing “that partnerships should be a part of that conversation to an extent that they were less so in the last couple of years.”