Amazon’s First Female Advisor Bails for SoFi

One of Amazon’s longtime executives has jumped ship to join online personal finance company Social Finance (SoFi).

Maria Renz spent 21 years at Amazon, starting out as the product manager in marketing and eventually becoming its first female technical adviser to Jeff Bezos. She compared that position to a “chief of staff,” explaining that her goal was to make Bezos “an even better CEO.”

Renz helped launch Amazon’s free shipping policy and served as the CEO of Amazon subsidiary Quidsi. She also oversaw other subsidiaries, including Woot, Abe Books, Endless.com and MyHabit.com, and was responsible for introducing new retail categories, including beauty, shoes and groceries.

Renz is the latest exec to leave the eCommerce giant. Steve Kessel, head of physical stores, resigned earlier this year, while Jeff Blackburn, who leads the entertainment, business development and advertising businesses, went on sabbatical earlier this year.

In the meantime, Renz will be an executive vice president and group business unit leader at SoFi, overseeing the company’s credit card, brokerage and bank account businesses.

Launched in 2011 as a student loan refinancing platform, SoFi has recently been focused on developing more financial products for its nearly one million members. In fact, the three SoFi business-unit leaders who now report to Renz all have backgrounds in the financial services industry.

Last year, the company revealed that it was adding crypto trading to its fast-growing SoFi Invest platform. And in January it announced a partnership with Mastercard, which will initially focus on the SoFi Money debit card, which offers no account fees, high-yielding interest, ATM fee reimbursements, mobile check deposit, P2P, and more. The two companies will also work together to develop new financial products, with Mastercard serving as the exclusive card network for SoFi’s upcoming credit card product.

“We want people to go to the SoFi app on their phone every day,” said CEO Anthony Noto, who joined the company from Twitter last year. “People want to borrow money, they want to save money, invest money, they have to spend money and they want to protect money. And our goal is to fill out that complete assortment and to do that better than anyone else.”