Vanessa Colella, chief innovation officer and head of Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing unit at US-listed bank Citi, has joined credit card provider Visa as head of innovation and digital partnerships.
Earlier this month, Visa had promoted its corporate development executive, David Rolf, to become head of Visa Ventures a year after its corporate venturing unit lost Kevin Jacques to Cota Capital’s Fintech Fund.
Colella had spent nearly a decade running Citi Ventures having been promoted to initially managing director, global head of venture investing and strategic growth initiatives in April 2013.
As well as overseeing a venture investing team, Colella built internal incubation teams, D10X and Studio, which use lean start-up methodology to generate ideas, launch products, and research trends that support economic growth, and expanded the CIO role to include Citi Productivity, which works to “transform the employee experience by leveraging the power of process simplification, operating model redesign, and new technologies to help Citi increase efficiency and effectiveness”.
A board member of US-based trade body National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) from last summer, Colella has built a strong team in CVC around her under Arvind Purushotham, global head of venture investing at Citi Ventures and GCV Powerlist award winner, which is one of the most active groups backing successful startups, such as Plaid, Square, DocuSign, Honey, Betterment, Netskope, Tanium, Braze and DataRobot.
Visa had tried to acquire Plaid before the deal fell through last year and the changes reflect the speed of disruption affecting the financial services industry.
In a joint guest comment published by Global Corporate Venturing last year, Colella said: “Until recently, technology, behaviour and society changed relatively slowly. Though immediate circumstances shifted constantly, the underlying evolutions that have transformed human life at scale largely unfolded at a steady pace. In the age of covid-19, however, that evolution is accelerating and companies seeking to grow through this time need to accelerate their pace of innovation.”
