As past chief executive officer of Global Payments, Jeff Sloan has deep industry knowledge in financial technology and over 30 years of experience. He joined Global Payments as president in 2010 and became chief executive officer in 2013. Jeff retired in June 2023.
Prior to joining Global Payments, Jeff was a partner and the worldwide head of the Financial Technology Group in New York for Goldman, Sachs & Co. He pioneered the development of the modern FinTech practice in investment banking, where he led many of the industry’s landmark transactions over two decades.
Jeff has been recognized by Institutional Investor as one of “America’s Best CEOs,” and by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of “Atlanta’s Most Admired CEOs.” He recently was inducted into the Georgia Fintech Hall of Fame for transforming Global Payments into a worldwide digital payments technology leader.
He has a long history of giving back to the communities where he and his former team members live and work. Jeff spearheaded the development of industry leading DEI, ESG and community / charitable involvement initiatives while at Global Payments.
He continues to serve on the executive committee and the board of directors of Fleetcor Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: FLT). Jeff also served for years on the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce; on the undergraduate executive board of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and on the board of the Atlanta Committee for Progress. In 2017 and 2018, Jeff was the president and chairman of the board of directors of the Electronic Transactions Association.
I’ve had three careers over the last three plus decades: a lawyer, an investment banker and an operating executive. These jobs may seem pretty different, but the reason I changed careers several times is because I like to mix things up. I like to feel uncomfortable, to not know the answer to things, to rethink how businesses and industries operate, to challenge myself, and to put strategies into action. Simply put, I like change.
I think about my core skill set as scaling technology growth companies. How did that work out at Global Payments? During my tenure as CEO for the last decade, revenues more than quintupled and operating profit and free cash flow increased almost tenfold with record margins.
Together with nearly 28,000 team members in 40 countries speaking 18 primary languages, the GPN team created the leading software driven payments company worldwide. Over the past 10 years, GPN stock compounded at 16.4% annually, 650 basis points per annum in excess of the S&P 500 index and 300 basis points in excess of its peers despite navigating through some of the most difficult markets over the last century.
I believe that pretty much every leading company today has to be a technology company in some form. That’s what customers, partners and stakeholders expect. A seamless digital interaction across channels. Faster, frictionless, cheaper. Monetizing data and analytics to make our lives easier. Leveraging the advantages of the cloud on a worldwide scale.
This is especially true in industries like FinTech that have been dominated by legacy players for decades. That was my thesis at Global Payments. We transformed GPN into an industry heavyweight with early and distinctive investments in integrated and owned software, pivoted its ecommerce offerings toward omnichannel acceptance years ahead of competitors and positioned the company for accelerating growth by seeding new lines of business including B2B and multiple new geographic markets.
We struck marquis collaborations with both AWS and Google for technology modernization, data center migration, data monetization and unique distribution. Today Global Payments is a top quartile public software company with market leading cloud SAAS businesses in a number of the most attractive target addressable markets.