Stripe Hires Cleary Gottlieb Partner as Global Policy Chief (1)

Online payment processor Stripe Inc. has hired Katherine Mooney Carroll, a one-time counselor to former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, to be its global head of policy.

Carroll was most recently a banking and regulatory partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, where she returned to the firm’s Washington office in May 2017 after spending a year working for Carter at the Defense Department.

During her time at the Defense Department, Carroll advised on the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, helped develop cybersecurity and intelligence initiatives, and counseled on important personnel matters.

Carroll wasn’t immediately available to discuss her new role at Stripe, where she will report to the financial technology company’s general counsel, Patricia “Trish” Walsh. A Stripe spokesman confirmed Carroll’s hire to Bloomberg Law.

Stripe, which recently added former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney to its board of directors, has been busy in recent months bolstering its in-house compliance, legal, and regulatory ranks. The company lists on its online careers page openings for dozens of legal and compliance jobs in cities like Berlin, Dublin, London, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Singapore.

In February, Stripe promoted Americas regulatory head Gerald Tsai, who joined the company a year ago, to be head of compliance. That same month Katharine Lauer, a former compliance executive at PayPal Holdings Inc. hired by Stripe in October, was named head of the company’s Americas regulatory team. Stripe U.S. regulatory counsel Leila Perkins was recently named its North America regulatory head.

In November, Stripe paid $200 million to acquire Paystack Payments Ltd., a Nigerian payments services startup. Stripe tapped Washington-based U.S. regulatory counsel Betre Gizaw in February to be Paystack’s Africa regulatory, policy, and legal lead.

Gizaw, a former international trade associate at King & Spalding, Morrison & Foerster, and now-defunct Dewey & LeBoeuf, joined Stripe in 2018.

More recent Stripe recruits include Oren Henry, a senior director and senior commercial and partnerships counsel at Visa Inc. who joined the company as a commercial, regulatory, and product counsel in January.

That same month Stripe hired Facebook Inc. associate general counsel Hsiu-Mei Chen as a regulatory counsel and brought on Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner litigation associate Douglas Alvarez as a legal counsel. Stripe confirmed its hire of all three lawyers in its San Francisco headquarters.

Aylin Oncel, a former commercial and product counsel who most recently served as Stripe’s head of community engagement, left the company in December to take a legal and development position at U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit providing pro bono technology services to local governments coping with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Coinbase Inc. also swiped Melissa Strait, a non-lawyer who served as Stripe’s global head of financial crimes, to be its new chief compliance officer in February.

Carroll, a Russian and Soviet studies major at Harvard University, began her career in the mid-1990s working at the Defense Department as a special assistant for international security policy. She then joined the Open Society Institute as a country director for the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan.

Cleary Gottlieb hired Carroll as an associate in 2001 after she graduated from Yale Law School. Carroll made partner in 2012 at the firm, where she specialized in anti-money laundering, cybersecurity, and financial services matters.

Stripe, a privately held company, is reportedly in discussions for a new round of financing. It has recently been valued at between $70 billion and $100 billion.

The company was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison. The two entrepreneurs are now billionaires.