X1 Hires Apple Card and Barclays Alums to Join its C-Suite as it Rolls Out to the Public

X1 Card (x1.co), the smartest credit card ever made, announced that former Apple Card exec Abhi Pabba and former Barclays exec Kieran Brady have been appointed as the company’s Chief Risk Officer and Chief Financial Officer respectively as X1 rolls out to the general public today. The hires are X1’s first ever CRO and CFO and follow the company’s hyper growth trajectory. With an X1 Card transaction happening every 5 seconds, the card has a projected annualized spend of $1 billion for 2022. It is open to the general public today, making it available to its 600,000-person application waitlist and beyond.

Before joining X1 as Chief Risk Officer, Abhi Pabba was the head of credit at Apple Inc.’s Apple Card. He will be responsible for scaling X1’s innovative underwriting strategy to hundreds of thousands of cardholders. Unlike other cards, X1 doesn’t rely solely on credit score. Instead, it analyzes a combination of income and credit history, making it possible to approve applicants who don’t have long backgrounds in credit and to set credit limits up to 5x higher than traditional cards.

During his time at Apple, Pabba helped scale Apple Card into a rapidly growing business and brought new innovations in credit strategies. While at Capital One, Pabba was an analyst heading the credit function for the $3 billion credit card authorization program, where he delivered one of the largest growth vectors in the program while creating a graduation strategy for underserved credit card customers.

Kieran Brady, who will be joining as Chief Financial Officer, was most recently the Chief Financial Officer at Newport Group, where he led finance, accounting, investor relations and M&A. Brady led Newport’s successful growth strategy through multiple M&A transactions and ultimately the merger with Ascensus in April 2022.

Prior to Newport Group, Brady served as Chief Financial Officer at Earnest, where he was responsible for building out the finance team and operational infrastructure of the organization. Under Brady’s leadership, Earnest became the largest refinancer of student loan debt in the US, originating billions of dollars of loans, and was acquired by Navient in 2017.

Before then, Brady was the Managing Director at Barclays Capital, where he advised and executed a wide array of transactions concerning consumer and commercial companies and founded Barclays’ fintech practice in 2010. Brady started his career as an aerospace engineer before making the move to Wall Street.

“Abhi and Kieran are rare leaders who have the experience and talent to steer X1 through this growth phase,” said Deepak Rao, co-founder of X1. “We’re honored by the overwhelming interest and the warm reception our card has received and are excited to finally make it available for all US customers.”

The hires and rollout follow X1’s $25 million Series B led by FPV Ventures, the venture firm founded by Google Analytics cofounder Wesley Chan