PayPal veteran Jim Magats is named CEO of MX, the startup that connects banks and fintech players

cnbc.com:

MX, the startup competing against Plaid to help connect financial institutions and fintech players, is naming PayPal executive Jim Magats its new CEO, CNBC has learned.

Magats, a nearly two-decade PayPal veteran who was most recently senior vice president for omni payments solutions, is set to start at Utah-based MX in mid-August, according to MX founder Ryan Caldwell.

«We're thrilled with the resonance that we've had with Jim, being a tenured executive in the space who fully understands not just the payments world, but the data and the connectivity world and really gets what MX is about,» Caldwell said in an interview.

MX, like rivals Plaid and Yodlee, has benefited from and helped facilitate the growth of the U.S. fintech ecosystem in recent years. The company uses software called application programming interfaces to help banks and fintechs securely «talk» to each other in terms of transactions and account data.

Magats is taking over at an interesting time: He is replacing Shane Evans, who was named interim CEO in January, when the company was preparing for an IPO or possible sale.

MX, which was valued at $1.9 billion in a funding round last year, had been seeking a transaction at a valuation of at least $5 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said at the time.

But since then, the market for IPOs has been mostly shut amid plunging equity prices, especially for formerly high-flying technology names. PayPal, for instance, was worth well over $300 billion at its peak last year; its market capitalization is now just under $100 billion.

That has weighed on the valuations of pre-IPO companies, as evidenced by the haircuts that prominent firms including Swedish fintech Klarna and payments giant Stripe have taken in