PayPal today announced that Rachel Kobetz has joined the company as Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer (CDO), reporting to John Kim, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. Rachel joins PayPal following more than 20 years in senior leadership roles building design organizations at some of the world’s largest companies.
Rachel comes to PayPal from her most recent position as SVP and Global Head of Design at Expedia Group, where she was responsible for leading the company’s Experience Design organization. Her responsibilities included design vision, experience strategy, and operational leadership for products and services for all Expedia Group stakeholders, including employees, travelers, partners, agents, and developers. Prior to this, Rachel was SVP and Head of Experience Design at Bank of America where she led the Experience Design organization to drive the end-to-end transformation of core product and service experiences. Rachel was also the Head of Studio, New Product UX at Amazon’s Design Group, and prior to this was Senior Director of UX at Samsung’s Mobile Innovation Lab.
In her role as PayPal’s SVP and CDO, she will be responsible for the design strategy and execution at scale across all end-to-end experiences (including PayPal, PayPal Braintree, Happy Returns, Honey, Venmo, Xoom, and Zettle) for consumers, merchants, developers, and employees globally.
“Rachel has a standard of excellence, creativity and innovation that we are excited to leverage during PayPal’s next phase,” said John Kim, EVP and CPO. “Her experience in financial services and consumer tech coupled with her ability to make technology more human makes her the perfect choice to help us create our next generation of experience-led products and services.”
“We have a massive opportunity to evolve our products and deliver ground-breaking design,” said Rachel, incoming SVP and CDO at PayPal. “I bring a renewed focus on design strategy, craft, quality, and innovation. And with other leaders throughout the company, we can elevate our experiences to set the bar within and across industries.”
