RealPage has brought in payments and buy-now-pay-later executive Zahir Khoja as its first chief fintech officer, sliding a seasoned money-movement specialist into the Richardson company’s C-suite. Khoja joins after leading Wave Financial, the H&R Block subsidiary, and previously held senior roles at Afterpay and Mastercard. The new post is designed to accelerate RealPage’s resident-facing finance and payments capabilities inside its property-management platform.
The hire and the creation of the fintech role were first detailed by the Dallas Business Journal, which framed the move as part of RealPage’s broader push into payments and resident financial services. Reporter Lauren McDonald covered the appointment.
Khoja previously served as CEO of Wave Financial, a business unit owned by H&R Block, and H&R Block’s newsroom notes he arrived there after senior posts at Afterpay and Mastercard. H&R Block said Khoja took the Wave CEO role effective July 1, 2022, experience the company will now bring to RealPage’s payments and resident-finance work.
RealPage’s fintech play
According to RealPage, the company already offers payments, deposit alternatives and digital disbursements alongside resident tools such as the LOFT portal. Creating a chief fintech officer puts a single executive on the hook for those payment and finance capabilities and for weaving them into leasing, accounting and resident workflows. The timing lines up with RealPage’s effort to deepen products that touch both property operators and renters.
Legal and regulatory backdrop
The appointment lands while RealPage remains in the middle of antitrust and algorithmic-pricing scrutiny: the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil complaint in August 2024 alleging RealPage’s pricing tools facilitated coordination among landlords. The Justice Department warned, "Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law," in its announcement. The Justice Department and subsequent reporting have made regulatory and legal risk an unavoidable factor for any offering that touches rent and payments, and investigative coverage from ProPublica helped trigger the federal inquiry.
RealPage also has a new CEO in place since late 2025. The company named Dirk Wakeham president and CEO in November, a leadership change RealPage described as part of a wider growth push. RealPage says Wakeham brings deep PropTech and FinTech experience to the role, and Khoja’s arrival appears to slot directly into that executive playbook.
What comes next is where things get interesting: whether Khoja’s team moves quickly to enhance resident payment options, expand rent-reporting features or build out buy-now-pay-later offerings for ancillary charges, all areas his Wave and Afterpay background suggests he can help scale. Regulators and renters alike will be watching how RealPage balances any new fintech bells and whistles with the legal and policy scrutiny already circling its pricing and payments tools.
