John MacIlwaine is co-founder and chief executive of Highnote, a San Francisco company that lets software platforms, fintechs, and brands issue their own cards and accept card payments through one platform. He started it in 2020 after more than two decades building the systems underneath consumer payments and lending.
An Engineer Inside Payments
MacIlwaine trained as an engineer, earning a B.S.E. in computer engineering from the University of Michigan. His early career ran through financial technology at firms including SunGard, Envestnet, and Morgan Stanley, and from 2007 to 2011 he led global development at Visa, the card network.
He then moved into the companies building on top of those networks. He was chief information officer at Green Dot, the prepaid card company, from late 2011 to mid-2012, and then chief technology officer at LendingClub from 2012 to 2016, the years when the online lender grew into a public company. After that he served as vice president and chief technology officer at Braintree, the payments business inside PayPal.
Building Highnote
Those jobs gave him a view of how many separate systems a modern card program needs: a processor, a ledger, a fraud stack, a bank partner, and a different vendor again to accept cards. Highnote was built to collapse that into one platform. It began with issuing for commercial, fleet, and spend cards, and in January 2025 it added merchant acquiring, so a single company could both issue and accept cards on the same ledger.
The approach drew attention. Highnote was valued at more than $750 million at its Series B, and Highnote was picked for the Forbes Fintech 50 two years running. Its competitors include Marqeta, Lithic, and SoFi Technology Solutions.
The Builder’s View
MacIlwaine describes the opportunity as giving every software company the tools a bank uses, without forcing it to become one. For a CTO who spent years stitching vendors together, Highnote is the platform he wished he had been able to buy.
