Who are Ripple's decision-makers?

Brad Garlinghouse joined Ripple as COO in 2015 and became CEO in early 2017. Before Ripple he was President of Consumer Applications at AOL (2009–2012) and held senior roles at Yahoo! (2003–2009), where he wrote the widely-read 'Peanut Butter Manifesto' — an internal memo criticizing the company's lack of strategic focus. At Ripple, he has been the driving strategic voice: he guided the company through the 4.5-year SEC litigation, the $1.25 billion Hidden Road acquisition, three additional acquisitions in 2025, and the $40 billion Series D. He has consistently articulated the case for blockchain as the future of global payments in Congressional testimony, World Economic Forum appearances, and industry media.

Monica Long, President since 2023, has been at Ripple since January 2015 — making her the company's longest-serving senior executive. She has owned global go-to-market strategy, the XRP ecosystem, and Ripple's institutional expansion narrative. In January 2026 she confirmed publicly — on Bloomberg — that Ripple has no IPO plans and intends to remain private, citing the company's strong financial position. She is the primary face of the company's push into on-chain tokenized financial products in APAC and beyond.

Co-founder Chris Larsen (Executive Chairman) is a serial fintech entrepreneur who previously founded E-Loan (one of the first online mortgage companies) and Prosper (peer-to-peer lending). He remains on Ripple's RLUSD advisory board alongside former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and former CENTRE Consortium CEO David Puth. Dennis Jarosch, CTO from October 2024, brings rare enterprise-payments credentials from Square, where he led Product, Design, and Engineering for the payment facilitation and money movement services powering the Square ecosystem — overseeing $150B+ in annual payments volume. He holds a PhD in Information Science from Humboldt University Berlin and an MSc in Computer Science from TU Berlin.

For enterprise SaaS and infrastructure vendors, the buying committee at Ripple divides across two primary axes. Technology and platform vendors — cloud infrastructure, data engineering, DevOps, security, developer tooling — are evaluated by CTO Dennis Jarosch and his engineering leadership. Ripple's Databricks-on-AWS data platform, C++ XRP Ledger core, and React/Java product surfaces all sit under this purview. Jarosch's background managing engineering-product-design jointly at Square means he is unusually involved in vendor selection even for product-adjacent tools, and his enterprise payments experience makes him a credibility-conscious buyer.

Go-to-market, analytics, CRM, and revenue tooling decisions flow through Monica Long's organization as President. Ripple Prime (the prime brokerage acquired via Hidden Road) adds a third buying center: post-acquisition integration needs across clearing systems, risk platforms, OMS/EMS, and client reporting are being managed by the Ripple Prime leadership team independently. The GTreasury acquisition creates a fourth surface: corporate treasury management SaaS integrations and data connectivity for enterprise clients. For regulated products — AML, KYC, compliance monitoring — the OCC bank charter application and 75 regulatory licenses globally mean that compliance vendor decisions carry C-suite and board-level visibility, with legal and compliance leadership necessarily in the loop.

Ripple has grown from a payments-only company into a multi-business-unit financial infrastructure firm in the span of twelve months. The core units post-2025 are: (1) Ripple Payments — the cross-border settlement business with 300+ institutional clients across 55+ countries; (2) Ripple Prime — the prime brokerage, rebranded from Hidden Road, processing 60M+ daily transactions; (3) GTreasury — corporate treasury management SaaS for enterprise clients managing cash, FX, and digital asset exposure; (4) Palisade (Custody) — digital asset wallet and vault infrastructure; and (5) Ripple National Trust Bank — the federally chartered trust entity pending OCC final approval, intended to custody RLUSD reserves.

With approximately 2,000 employees across 8+ offices on 6 continents, Ripple has shifted from a lean startup to a distributed enterprise. The October 2025 Hidden Road acquisition added an entire institutional brokerage team overnight, primarily concentrated in New York. Engineering is led by Jarosch and distributed across San Francisco (HQ), New York, London, and Singapore. Monica Long's commercial organization mirrors this geography, with APAC explicitly named as a growth priority for on-chain tokenization mandates.