This profile is part of the Wellth 30, a curated recognition of the leaders building enduring brands, communities, and culture.
Jinal Shah, Chief Customer & Marketing Officer, Zip US
Jinal Shah's title at Zip is Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, which is broader than the job she was hired for. She arrived in 2021 as chief marketing officer for the U.S. market. Now she has product and customer experience, too — on the logic that you can't grow a customer base for something you had no say in building.
The business case for that expansion is hard to miss. Zip grew revenue 46% year over year in FY25 while Shah realigned marketing investment around customer lifetime value and scaled the company's Commerce Media business 40%.
Her "Pay How You Want" campaign with Las Vegas Aces player Kelsey Plum drove an 8% increase in organic branded search and accounted for 15% of customer growth. The point wasn't to separate brand from performance. It was to make them work as one system.
She’s done the same thing with the customer experience. Shah launched a Voice of the Customer program, introduced a live customer health dashboard and secured board-level support for embedding marketing into onboarding, product and engineering. Zip's BNPL Card became its fastest-growing product.
She has also pushed the company's idea of financial empowerment beyond the transaction itself. Through Zip's partnership with PBS's Opportunity Knocks, she connected customers to coaching and more than 17,000 local resources spanning housing, healthcare, job training and legal aid.
Her influence extends to how Zip operates, too. Under Shah’s leadership, the company deployed an AI-powered customer service agent alongside new standards for accuracy and compliance in a regulated environment. And the organization she has built reports the lowest voluntary attrition at Zip, with engagement among the highest company-wide.
The result is a different definition of the marketing job: not the department that promotes the product, but the function that helps determine what the product is, how it works for customers and whether the business grows.
