JPMorgan Chase Hires Visa’s Vanessa Maren as Head of CRE Digital Business
By Cathy Cunningham July 10, 2023 9:00 am
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Vanessa Maren has joined JPMorgan Chase as head of commercial real estate digital business within the firm’s commercial banking division, Commercial Observer can first report.
Maren joins from Visa, and brings more than two decades of experience in digital payments, private equity, investment banking and investment management to her new role. At JPMorgan, she’ll lead a team focused on helping the bank’s clients run their businesses through digital banking and integrated payment and Treasury solutions.
Maren is based in San Francisco and will report to Al Brooks, head of commercial real estate.
“As a respected leader in the payments, banking and digital innovation space, I’m thrilled that Vanessa is joining and leading our strong CRE digital team,” Brooks said. “She joins at a pivotal moment for the firm as we’re investing in technology to support digital rent invoicing solutions for clients across the market, both large and small, to help run their businesses more efficiently, from anywhere and anytime.”
Maren’s purview will include Story by J.P. Morgan, the bank’s digital commercial real estate management platform that helps individual multifamily property owners and operators streamline the management of their rental portfolios through automated invoicing and receipt of online rent payments. At the other end of the ownership scale, Maren will also oversee Digital Rent Payments — a program rolled out in partnership with Paymentus — which facilitates rent payments on behalf of multifamily developers and real estate investment trusts.
“It’s an exciting time to join the firm as we continue to drive innovation in an industry that is historically fragmented when it comes to technology,” Maren said in prepared remarks. “Real estate is one of the biggest asset classes in the U.S., and its importance to the overall economy and the well-being of Americans is hard to overstate.”
As is the size of the specific market that Maren is stepping into, with roughly 30 percent of Americans renting their homes and those same renters spending roughly $485 billion in rental payments per year.
“I am excited to lead the team and support our clients and their customers with a digital-first mindset,” Maren added.
Maren was previously senior director of business development at Visa, where she led the growth of the company’s real-time payments platform with technology and fintech partners. Prior to that, she founded and spent a decade as a managing director at GloveRock Capital Partners — a boutique private equity advisory firm focused on capital raising, fund structuring and other services for investment funds and fintech growth-stage companies — and also held senior positions at Bloomberg and Barclays.
Cathy Cunningham can be reached at ccunningham@commercialobserver.com
