Acorns Adds a New President Ahead of Crypto Launch and Public Debut

Simple Finance CEO David Hijirida has officially joined the executive team at Acorns as the micro investing app’s President.

Hijirida joins Acorns from Simple Finance, where he has spent the last two and a half years as the Portland-based neobank’s CEO. Before that he spent almost 12 years at Amazon, including a stint as the Director of the AWS Commerce Platform. While at the tech giant he also served as Director of Global Payments and as Director of Advertising.

The Hawaiian native also brings experience working at traditional banks including his time as the VP of Product Development at FleetBoston Financial, which has since been bought by and integrated into Bank of America.

In conversation with Bloomberg, CEO Noah Kerner said that given Hijirida’s fintech, payments, operations, and product development expertise he “will be a great addition to our team at Acorns as we take the next step to our future.”

His appointment comes about a month after Acorns hired Twitter’s VP of Finance, Rich Sullivan, as CFO.

In May 2021, Irvine, California-based Acorns revealed plans to merge with Pioneer Merger Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which gives the fintech platform a $2.2 billion valuation. The company has also revealed plans to add cryptocurrency trading to its suite of offerings, which already provides subscribers with education, investing, banking, earning, and wealth-making features.