11
Maria Gotsch
President and Chief Executive Officer
Partnership Fund for New York City
Civic boosterism and job creation are core missions of the Partnership Fund for New York City, which was founded in 1996 by KKR & Co. co-chairman Henry Kravis and has channeled more than $135 million into some 150 for-profit and not-for-profit entities. Given the fund’s Big Apple focus, it stands to reason that financial enterprises would be among the beneficiaries; microfinance organization Grameen America and derivatives market operator trueEX Group are currently in the portfolio. Led in a more inventive direction by president and CEO Maria Gotsch, the fund became one of the earliest — and remains among the most vocal — promoters of the new wave of fintech innovation. It even takes some credit for popularizing the term, having established the FinTech Innovation Lab in New York in 2010. The motivation was “to make New York City the capital of fintech, not just finance,” says Gotsch, 49, a Harvard Business School MBA who was with investment bank BT Wolfensohn before joining the Partnership Fund in 1999. A joint effort with Accenture — the consulting firm’s capital markets practice leader, Robert Gach, is co-founder — the fintech-acceleration lab has been replicated in Dublin, Hong Kong and London, bringing selected start-ups into contact with industry executives and venture capitalists for mentoring and exploration of ongoing business dealings. Gotsch says one of the labs’ distinguishing features is their “long tail” — the lasting relationships that are kindled by the 12 weeks of boot-camp-like intensity. And she takes pride in the market’s validation of the graduates, such as the September acquisition of BillGuard (class of 2012) for $30 million by online lender Prosper Marketplace. Gotsch recalls: “When we were setting up, people asked, ‘What is fintech?’ Not anymore.”
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35
1. James Robinson III 2. Jane Gladstone 3. Matthew Harris 4. Steven McLaughlin 5. Jonathan Korngold |
6. Richard Garman & 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park 8. Thomas Jessop 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka 10. Hans Morris |
11. Maria Gotsch 12. Marc Andreessen 13. Barry Silbert 14. Jay Reinemann 15. Mariano Belinky |
16. François Robinet 17. Vanessa Colella 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena 20. Rodger Voorhies |
21. Michael Schlein 22. Kenneth Marlin 23. Rumi Morales 24. Mark Beeston 25. Vladislav Solodkiy |
26. Fabian Vandenreydt 27. Derek White 28. Alex Batlin 29. Jeffrey Greenberg 30. P. Howard Edelstein |
31. Nektarios Liolios 32. Roy Bahat 33. Andrew McCormack 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer 35. Janos Barberis |
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