• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 9, 2014

To find its financial footing -- and strengthen ties with Wall Street investors -- Snapchat has hired Imran Khan as its first chief strategy officer.

Well-known within tech finance circles, Khan most recently served as head of Internet banking at Credit Suisse. There, he is perhaps best known for leading Alibaba’s blockbuster IPO earlier this year.

To date, Snapchat has raised more than $160 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Benchmark, among other investors. Most recently valued at $10 billion to $12 billion, an IPO is now more likely under the guidance of Khan.

With its war chest, Snapchat has been trying to assemble a more experienced management team. Earlier this year, it poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall, to serve as vice president of business and marketing partnerships. Late last year, meanwhile, Snapchat brought in former Instagram executive Emily White as its chief operating officer.

Reporting directly to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Khan is expected to start at the end of January.

Since popularizing the disappearing mobile message, Snapchat’s growth has been impressive. The company experienced the highest growth in time spent in July, with total minutes up 114% year-over-year — from 2.6 billion to 5.5 billion minutes, per a note from JPMorgan, citing comScore data. (By comparison, Facebook saw its time spent rise from 137 billion to 178 billion minutes, during the same period.)

Yet Snapchat’s revenue strategy remains in its infancy. Snapchat only recently introduced ads to its platform; it remains opt-in and untargeted. Just like content in Snapchat’s "Stories" section, the ads disappear after users view them, or within 24 hours. Also, at least for the moment, Snapchat is promising not to put ads in users’ “personal communication,” i.e., Snaps or Chats.

Snapchat also recently waded into the peer-to-peer payments business in collaboration with Square Cash. To use its new Snapcash service, users need to volunteer their debit-card number on their smartphone, where the account information is held by Square.

Mobile payments are becoming big business, according to Forrester, which recently predicted that the total volume will almost triple from around $50 billion this year to $142 billion in 2019. Peer-to-peer payments are also expected to more than triple from $5.2 billion this year to $17 billion by 2019.

Threatening its standing as a secure platform, however, hackers recently intercepted hundreds of thousands of private user messages, which they promised to release to the public.

As such, it remains an open question whether or not users with trust Snapchat with their money.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Khan’s appointment.