The 2015 Tech 50: Deborah Hopkins

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< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

8
Deborah Hopkins
Chief Executive Officer
Citi Ventures
Last year: 11

Incubators, accelerators, R&D labs, strategic venture funds — these are routes new technologies travel on their way to market acceptance. To gain insights and prepare themselves for the latest new things, a growing number of financial institutions have taken up one or another of these activities. Citigroup does them all. They are part of the mission of Citi Ventures, a Palo Alto, California–based unit headed by Deborah Hopkins, who is also chief innovation officer of the New York–based parent. “We are a small team of about two dozen,” she says, “supporting a very big company” that has $1.9 trillion in assets, operates in more than 160 countries and employs some 240,000. Citi Ventures is a self-styled “innovation engine,” out to prove that a big industry incumbent can overcome bureaucracy and inertia to thrive in a world changing at what Hopkins calls “exponential speed.” Citi Ventures’ marquee is a venture capital portfolio that made its first investment in 2011, profited from two exits (fraud detection start-up Silver Tail Systems, acquired by EMC Corp. in 2012, and mobile commerce company Shopkick, bought by South Korea’s SK Planet in 2014) and currently holds New Age investment adviser Betterment and payment processor Square, among others. The objective is “bigger than ROI,” says Hopkins, 60, formerly CFO of Boeing Co. and Lucent Technologies and chief operations and technology officer of Citi, who set up shop in Silicon Valley in 2010. Over the past two years, her group has linked Citi’s technology labs around the world into a better-coordinated network, launched a fintech accelerator in Israel and another, multiregional one in partnership with Sunnyvale, California–based Plug and Play Tech Center. “We have to be unencumbered by apparent constraints and think like a start-up, in the boldest way possible, about solving customer problems,” she adds.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50