PayPal poaches Wells Fargo’s innovation executive Peggy Mangot for venture capital team

PayPal has hired Peggy Mangot, a former entrepreneur who led the development of a standalone mobile banking app at Wells Fargo, for its internal venture capital team, CNBC has learned.

Mangot recently joined the online payments giant as operating partner of PayPal Ventures, according to people with knowledge of the move. In the VC world, operating partners typically act as a primary liaison with portfolio companies and work to increase the value of the start-ups.

A PayPal spokeswoman confirmed the hire and declined to make Mangot available for an interview.

At Wells Fargo, Mangot was a senior vice president who helped develop Greenhouse, a fee-free mobile banking app that aimed to help younger users and gig economy workers build responsible spending habits. Like a similar JPMorgan Chase effort called Finn, the app competed with the bank’s main retail banking offerings in some ways, and Wells Fargo stopped accepting new customers for it last month.

Mangot, who also founded micro-investing start-up SparkGift and was head of a payments and commerce partnerships team at Google, joined Wells Fargo in 2016, shortly after the creation of the bank’s innovation team.

PayPal, a pioneer in online payments, went public in 2002, was acquired by eBay shortly after, and was spun off in 2015. The San Jose-based company is on a tear, posting record quarterly results last month as the coronavirus pandemic accelerated e-commerce and digital payments trends. PayPal’s $231 billion market capitalization is larger than every U.S. bank except for JPMorgan Chase.

PayPal’s venture capital arm focuses on early round investments in fintech start-ups that have strategic relevance to the payments firm, its merchants or customers. Portfolio companies include investing app Acorns, retail returns service Happy Returns and European digital bank Monese.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal and Comcast Ventures are investors in Acorns.