Meet the top minds behind Walmart-backed ONE: The secretive fintech that has attracted top talent from Goldman Sachs, Apple, and Meta
- Walmart has edged into the fintech space with the launch of ONE.
- Leadership has come to ONE from firms like Goldman Sachs, Apple, and Lyft.
- Meet the 13 key leaders manning the helm of ONE, from C-suiters to product-and-engineering talent.
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Walmart has hinted at its ambitions in the fintech space for nearly two years.
In January 2021, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant first announced it was pursuing a fintech venture in partnership with the venture-capital firm Ribbit Capital, which was an early backer of Robinhood.
Details on the project were scant, but it wasn't long before Walmart was grabbing headlines again.
The following month, news broke that the project had lured two high-profile executives, Omer Ismail and David Stark, away from Goldman Sachs' nascent consumer bank, Marcus.
The group steadily added talent from blue-chip tech and finance companies, but it kept most details of its strategy under wraps.
The secretive venture, which was once known as Hazel, again made a splash this January, announcing it had acquired both Even, an earned-wage-access startup, and the neobank ONE. Following the latter acquisition, Hazel took on the ONE name and branding.
The deal also offered a peek behind the curtain of the new venture's plan. Ismail told The Wall Street Journal at the time of the acquisitions that the company planned to build a financial super app.
Super apps put multiple activities — like banking, budgeting, shopping, and stock and crypto trading – in one place. Universal banking models have achieved massive success in markets like China and Southeast Asia, but similar efforts at other startups have faced difficulty in a US-banking market that incumbent financial firms dominate.
The field is crowded with other contenders from large players like PayPal, Cash App, and SoFi, to smaller firms like Chime and buy-now, pay-later providers like Klarna and Affirm.
Legacy banks are also increasingly responding to the threat from fintech startups with varying levels of success. From JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to Marcus, top financial firms have revamped digital offerings throughout the pandemic and emphasized tech-forward approaches.
Big banks attempts to digitize, however, can sometimes fall flat. Finn, JPMorgan's digital-only bank aimed at a younger demographic, was shuttered less than two years after launching. Marcus has also faced challenges, as Insider has previously reported, as it matures and struggles to get new products, like a checking account and a robo-advisor, off the ground.
The departures of key executives leading these changes, then, can have consequences for incumbent players. This February, for example, Bloomberg reported that Goldman executives, dismayed by the departure of Ismail and Stark, clawed back stock bonuses for the duo that had already vested.
At ONE, meanwhile, Bloomberg recently reported that the company plans to beta test its own checking accounts in the coming weeks, and that it will soon launch a cash-back feature for some purchases made with ONE's debit card, including those at Walmart.
Insider identified the key people shaping the strategy of the secretive endeavor using LinkedIn profiles and news reports. ONE currently has around 300 employees, many of whom have a combination of experience at both early-stage startups and large financial-services firms or tech companies.
ONE representatives declined Insider's request for comment.
Here are the 13 people shaping ONE's strategy.
Omer Ismail, chief executive officer
Omer Ismail's move from Marcus to Walmart's nascent fintech startup in early 2021 marked a significant milestone. Ismail had spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, where he rose to the rank of partner, and was instrumental behind the scenes in building Marcus.
Soon after he was tapped to head Goldman's entire consumer division, Ismail departed for ONE (which at the time had yet to be named) just a few months into its creation. While Ismail was at Marcus, Goldman made significant strides in building out its consumer-banking business, from inking a cobranded partnership with Apple to purchasing GM's credit-card portfolio and growing deposits to roughly $100 billion.
David Stark, chief operating officer
Along with Ismail, David Stark was the other key Goldman partner to make the initial leap from Marcus to ONE. Stark, whose move to ONE was reported at the same time as Ismail's, had been at Goldman for six years.
Stark took on multiple roles at Marcus, but biggest among them were serving as chief risk officer for consumer lending, heading Marcus' Apple Card partnership, and heading up other large partnerships. Prior to joining Goldman, Stark was a longtime veteran of Citigroup, spending more than 17 years in a range of product, risk, and operations roles across Citi's cards business.
Mitch Hochberg, chief compliance officer
Mitch Hochberg is another major former Marcus exec to make the leap to ONE. He joined the startup in June after more than six years at Goldman Sachs, where he was a managing director and served as the head of compliance for Marcus and other banking products.
Before joining Goldman in 2016, Hochberg cofounded and served as general counsel of Fenway Summer, a startup venture-capital firm. Fenway Summer has invested in a range of startups over the last decade, from the logistics giant Flexport and the stablecoin issuer Circle to the embedded-investments startup DriveWealth, according to Crunchbase.
Hochberg was also senior counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he led the CFPB's mortgage-servicing rulemaking efforts.
Brian Hamilton, chief commercial officer
Brian Hamilton, ONE's cofounder and former CEO, joined the Walmart-backed fintech as part of its acquisition of ONE earlier this year. Prior to cofounding ONE, Hamilton spent time as a senior vice president at Capital One leading the firm's merchant bank, and served as head of business and product at Stack Labs, an intelligent-lighting startup acquired by Philips in 2017.
In 2017, Hamilton launched an earlier iteration of an online, small-business-oriented bank, Azlo. Azlo received early funding and support from BBVA, but the bank ultimately closed down in early 2021 along with another BBVA company, Simple, a consumer neobank, with the sale of its US retail business to PNC.
Laura Nadler, chief financial officer
Laura Nadler joined ONE as its finance chief this August. Most recently, she was the CFO at Minted, an online art-and-design marketplace. She has also served as the CFO of Afterpay North America prior to the closing of its acquisition by Block, Cash App's parent company.
Nadler also held senior roles at Visa, where she oversaw marketing and corporate finance, and JPMorgan, where she mainly worked in the firm's private wealth-management business.
Raffi Vartkessian, head of operations
Raffi Vartkessian brings nearly 12 years of experience at Apple to his role as ONE's head of operations, which he began in May. While at Apple, Vartkessian was the head of business operations for Apple Pay, where he oversaw the design and launch of Apple Cash as well as the development of Apple Card's operational features and management of Apple Pay's third-party partnerships.
Prior to that role, he helped revamp Apple's merchandising strategy and oversaw the creation of a new retail-store system as a senior manager on the company's sales-operations team. Before his time at Apple, Vartkessian worked in other sales and project-management roles in the healthcare and biotech industries.
Samantha Goldman, brand and marketing lead
Samantha Goldman is the brand and marketing lead for ONE, a role she took on after serving as Even's chief marketing officer prior to the merger with ONE. She brings experience at startups, tech firms, and big banks. Goldman previously held roles at Lyft, where she oversaw marketing for its small-business and enterprise-business units, Citi, and Castlight Health, a health-benefits-navigation platform.
Tom Hoare, chief corporate affairs and administrative officer
Tom Hoare oversees ONE's external and internal communications, among other functions. Prior to joining ONE in the fall of 2021, Hoare held senior marketing and communications roles at BNY Mellon and the software giant SAP.
Hoare began his career in politics, holding roles in the Massachusetts state government, the chief of staff's office in the George W. Bush White House, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Olivia Bishop, engineering lead
Olivia Bishop is ONE's engineering lead, transitioning from her role as the head of engineering at Even, which she held before the merger with ONE.
Before joining Even in January 2019, Bishop had a five-year stint at Facebook as a software engineer and engineering manager, where she helped build out the company's React Native software framework.
Mike Barreiro, chief technology officer
Michael Barreiro serves as ONE's chief technology officer, a role he has held at the company since June 2020, prior to its acquisition and merger with Even.
He first joined ONE in February 2019 as its vice president of engineering. Prior to ONE, Barriero was the vice president of technology at the San Francisco-based neobank Azlo and vice president of technology for the real-estate transaction-management company SkySlope.
Emily Chardac, chief people officer
Emily Chardac oversees ONE's recruiting and human-resources operations. She joined the company this March.
Prior to her role at ONE, Chardac founded and ran her own hiring-and-human-resources-consulting firm for tech and finance firms, HRwired. Earlier in her career, she also spent time in HR leadership roles at Guggenheim Partners and Mozilla. She was an early employee at Square from 2013 to 2015, where she was the head of people ops and benefits as the company prepared for its IPO.
Zach Kennedy, head of design
Zach Kennedy joined ONE in June as the company's head of design after over a year as the head of design at the DNA-testing company 23andMe.
Kennedy is a two-time Apple alum, most recently serving as a senior product-design manager and creative director from 2017 to 2019.
Earlier in his career, he spent nearly 10 years at the tech giant as a user-interface designer and creative. Kennedy has also held roles throughout his career at companies like Disney, DreamWorks Animation, and Google, where he oversaw UX design for Google's Nest products.
Evan Goldschmidt, product lead
Goldschmidt became ONE's product lead in April after serving as Even's chief technology officer for seven years prior to its merger with ONE. Before his time with Even and ONE, he worked at Google for nearly four years and worked as a software engineer on products like Gmail and Google Glass.