PayPal's Former Retail Chief Kingsborough Joins Capital One

Don Kingsborough, the retail and payments veteran who was, most recently, a high-ranking PayPal executive, has joined Capital One to work on a team that invests in and acquires startups. The move comes about six months after Kingsborough left PayPal, where he led the company’s high-profile initiative to push PayPal as a payment method in brick-and-mortar stores.

At Capital One, Kingsborough will join the Ventures team as a managing director, but he said in an interview that he imagines he will also work on broader digital initiatives outside of the ventures group, too. He said he was intrigued by the company’s reputation as one of the most aggressive banks when it comes to adapting to the world of digital and mobile banking.

“They are going to make a bold move to be a tech company at the same time as a bank, be a consumer company at the same time as a bank, and to be an innovator in terms of new services at the same time as a bank,” he said. “All of those things really surprised me and made it extraordinarily attractive.”

The hire comes as the bank continues to make acquisitions to add digital design and development talent to the company, as the future of physical bank branches remains uncertain. Earlier this month, the company announced the acquisition of mobile development firm Monsoon, which followed last year’s acquisition of Web design firm Adaptive Path.

Kingsborough spent four years at PayPal; the company’s expansion into store payments, which he oversaw, had mixed results. Prior to PayPal, Kingsborough held C-level positions at Atari and prepaid-card company Blackhawk Network and created the toy company that made the Teddy Ruxpin bear a hit in the 1980s. Kingsborough also serves on the board of the shopping mall company Westfield and the heavily funded online gift-card marketplace Raise.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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