Alex Sion has departed from Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of US-based financial services firm Citi Group.
Sion has taken up a managing director role at Motive Create, an open innovation subsidiary of US-based financial technology-focused venture capital firm Motive Partners.
“At Motive, I will be responsible for leading the firm’s efforts to partner with FSIs around innovation, building new products and incubating new businesses for partnering and co-investment,” Sion told Global Corporate Venturing.
“The goal is to create new operating and investing models that solve some of the corporate innovation challenges I experienced at Citi and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPMC).”
Sion was part of Citi Ventures for four years, first as head of venture incubation and global consumer banking for three years from 2018 before becoming head of market growth.
Formed in 2008, Citi Ventures focuses on financial services technology developers. The unit has 92 active portfolio companies such as modern analytics platform Datameer and synthetic data platform Mostly.Ai.
Citi Ventures has invested in over 207 startups and achieved about 60 exits, including internet coupons portal Honey, which was acquired by PayPal for $4bn, making it one of Citi’s most successful exits.
Prior to his time at Citi Ventures, Sion was the general manager of JPMC’s mobile channel and in 2006 served as an initial member and was the senior vice-president for three years of MyFi by Citi, which has since been rebranded as the Citi Personal Wealth Management.
Regarding his new position, Sion told GCV: “Motive Create wants to build a partnership model that enables incumbents to get the benefit of building new products and capabilities that solves their problems and creates an unfair advantage to monetize these investments in the market.”