Usio, Inc. ("Usio" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: USIO), a leading FinTech company that operates a full stack of integrated, cloud-based electronic payment and embedded financial solutions, today announced that Linda Loof has joined the Company as Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships.
Loof’s appointment adds a highly experienced payments executive to Usio’s leadership team at a pivotal time in the Company’s growth strategy. She will be responsible for expanding and deepening relationships with financial institutions, fintechs, technology providers and other strategic partners, with a focus on creating new distribution channels, increasing platform utilization and identifying opportunities that can translate Usio’s payments infrastructure into incremental revenue and long-term shareholder value.
“Linda is exactly the type of strategic leader we want on the Usio team as we enter our next phase of growth,” said Louis Hoch, Chief Executive Officer of Usio. “She has spent her career building partnerships across banking, payments and fintech, and she understands how to turn those relationships into real business opportunities. Her network, industry credibility and experience with bank-fintech partnerships gives Usio another powerful avenue to expand our reach, accelerate adoption of our platform and create new sources of recurring revenue. We are extremely pleased to have Linda join us.”
Loof brings more than two decades of payments and financial-services experience, with a career focused on strategic partnership management, business development and the commercialization of payment and banking technologies. Her background includes senior leadership roles at Pathward Financial (fka MetaBank, dba Meta Payment Systems) and TransPecos Banks, where she worked with financial institutions, fintech companies, payment networks and technology providers.
At Meta Payment Systems, Loof served as SVP of Strategic Accounts, where her work included strategic relationships within the prepaid and payments ecosystem. She is well known within the payments industry as an innovator and holds the respect not only within the payments industry but also with financial regulators and card associations.
At TransPecos Banks, Loof served in senior partnership and business-development roles, including Head of Card Programs and Head of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development. In that capacity, she was involved in helping fintech and payments companies connect with regulated banking infrastructure. She also represented TransPecos Banks in the launch of The Clearing House’s RTP® Network, to leverage the broader evolution toward faster, API-driven money movement.
“Usio has an impressive combination of payment acceptance, card issuing, ACH processing, a payment facilitation platform-as-a-service model, electronic bill presentment and payment,and print and mail capabilities,” said Loof. “I see significant opportunity to leverage those capabilities through stronger strategic partnerships. I am excited to work with the Usio team to build relationships that expand distribution, create new use cases and help more financial institutions, fintechs, governments and businesses access modern payment infrastructure.”
The Company believes the addition of Loof can strengthen Usio’s ability to pursue partnership-led growth across multiple areas of its business. Her experience working with banks and fintechs is particularly relevant as financial institutions increasingly seek technology partners that can help them deliver modern payment experiences without having to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure themselves.
The Company’s payment facilitation platform-as-a-service model is designed to allow partners to incorporate payment capabilities into their own products and customer experiences.
“Our objective is not simply to add more partners,” Hoch added. “We want to build partnerships that increase transaction volume, expand our addressable market and make Usio more deeply embedded in the financial workflows of our customers and partners. Linda’s experience aligns directly with that strategy. We believe her appointment can help us move faster and be more deliberate about where we deploy our technology, our people and our capital.”
Loof’s appointment also reinforces Usio’s broader strategy of leveraging its technology infrastructure through partnership channels rather than relying solely on direct customer acquisition. The Company expects strategic partnerships to remain an important component of its efforts to increase transaction volumes, diversify revenue opportunities and improve operating leverage as its platform scales.