FinTech Atlanta named 20-plus-year tech veteran Ravi Venkatesan, the current CEO of software and payments company Cantaloupe Inc., as its newest board member.
Founded in 2016, FinTech Atlanta is a nonprofit pushing for growth, talent expansion and public policy influence within the city’s financial technology industry. Atlanta is the home base to a number of fintech and payment processing leaders, such as Global Payments Inc., First Data Corp. and Total System Services Inc. Tech giants like Cash App and Fiserv Inc. have also established hubs in Atlanta over the years.
Barry McCarthy, chair of FinTech Atlanta and executive vice president and head of network and security solutions at First Data, has estimated that about 70% of all global transactions pass through companies headquartered in Atlanta.
Venkatesan's appointment is effective immediately. It comes during a turbulent period for the tech sector at large. Over the past several months, tech companies have implemented mass layoffs as a way to cut costs after seeing 40-year high levels of inflation and lower-than-predicted quarterly earnings.
PayPal Holdings Inc., Affirm and Chime Financial Inc. are among many fintech companies to layoff employees and join the likes of Meta Platforms Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp.
Despite the thousands of layoffs announced in early 2023, metro Atlanta’s tech sector has added jobs over the past year. The information sector, which includes most tech employers, saw job growth increase 1.3% between February 2022 to February 2023, according to a report from commercial real estate research firm CoStar Group.
Venkatesan was named CEO of Cantaloupe in the fourth quarter of last year, which is a digital payments and software services company for self-service commerce headquartered in Pennsylvania. He previously served as the company's COO, where he drove business strategy and product innovation, and chief technology officer. Previously, he was head of innovation at Bakkt Holdings Inc. and spent time as a consultant leader with Accenture plc.
