American Express has hired an experienced payments exec and technologist to help lead and scale product management for consumer products. Erich Ringewald, the former CTO of mobile payments platform BOKU, is joining AmEx as vice president of Software Product Management for the U.S. Consumer Services business.
Ringewald was one of Boku’s founders and helped build the company from a startup into a global payments platform operating in 66 countries with 245 wireless carriers. Prior to joining Boku, Ringewald was a general manager and vice president of Amazon.com, where he led the development of AmazonMP3, and also oversaw Amazon’s third-party seller platform, Amazon.com Auctions, Amazon.com zshops, and Amazon.com’s global payments platform.
Ringewald also co-founded Accept.com, which dealt with person-to-person payments on the Internet. Accept.com was acquired by Amazon and the technology was used to power payments for Amazon.com’s third-party sellers. Before founding Accept, Ringewald worked at Apple, where he managed the Operating System Advanced Technology teams, the Macintosh Operating System team, and the European Software Research and Development team.
“As the payments space becomes increasingly digital, building great software is rapidly becoming core to our products and our success,” said Josh Silverman, president of the U.S. Consumer Services business. “Erich will be instrumental in helping American Express turn ideas into innovative products and do so more quickly — adding to the competitive advantage we already have as we connect buyers and sellers with an increasingly enhanced consumer experience.”
Considering Ringewald’s experience and background, this is a big win for AmEx. The credit card giant has its own digital payments and commerce platform, Serve, and has been looking to expand its presence in the digital and mobile payments space.