IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

Omar Mansur, Enterprise Lead Global Projects, Codebase Technologies ; Dr Jasmin B Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder, LXME   You can’t have one without the other! Embedded finance may be defined as offering access to a range of financial services and solutions via a merchant website on a customer journey that is not interrupted by the need to leave the site you are on to go to that of a financial institu...

Arjan Verbeek, CEO & Co-Founder, Perenna The UK’s newest bank, Perenna, has been awarded a UK banking licence ‘with restrictions’ by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority. This is the penultimate step before a full banking licence is granted. When that happens, which the bank expects in Q1 2023, it will begin offering long-term fixed rate mortgages (30-year, 9...

Mahmood Shamsher Ali, Pakistan Country Representative, Alif Bank Alif is a Central Asian FinTech operating as a full-fledged bank in Tajikistan and as an e-commerce and FinTech company in Uzbekistan. The company, originally established in 2014, has a full banking licence in Tajikistan and a payments licence in Uzbekistan. It has also applied for a digital banking licence in Pakistan – one of 20 ap...

Serge Tohme, Managing Director EMEA, Finastra , & Gary McDermott, Treasurer, The Co-operative Bank The Co-operative Bank selected Finastra Kondor in the cloud, available via Microsoft Azure, to upgrade its treasury infrastructure and automate manual reporting and processes. Finastra’s focus on ESG concerns fits with The Co-operative Bank’s stance on ethical banking. Moving from an on-premises...

Ellison Anne Williams, CEO & Founder, Enveil   Privacy-enhancing technologies for secure data search protect data while it's being used or processed. The development of privacy-enhancing technologies is a hot topic for financial services. The UN estimates that up to $2 trillion of cross-border money laundering occurs each year. Greater information sharing and collaborative analytics among...

Jacob Rider, Head of Payments, Projective November 2022 marks the point of migration for some of the top global payment infrastructures to ISO 20022, an international standard for exchanging electronic messages between financial institutions, covering cards, payments, securities, FX and trade. Most banks, corporates and payments companies use SWIFT MT financial messaging for transactions, which wi...

Samantha Bamert, Founder & CEO of Ask Inclusive Finance According to The Rose Review, access to and awareness of funding was highlighted as the number one issue for female entrepreneurs. Women launch businesses with 53% less capital on average than men, are less aware of funding options and less likely to take on debt. In honor of Women’s Equality Day celebrated on Aug 26th, Samantha Bamers, t...

Chris Blackhurst, Author, Too Big to Jail ‘Too Big to Jail’, subtitled ‘Inside HSBC, the Mexican drug cartels and the greatest banking scandal of the century’ tells the story behind the record fine of $1.9 billion handed out to HSBC in 2012 by US authorities along with a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice (there were no prosecutions). The fine related to money launder...

Liam Chennells, CEO & Founder, Detected Detected fills the KYB gap in the payments’ technology stack with a ‘Find Company’ algorithm that aims to find any registered company globally. The startup’s Connected Compliance API can search and locate business credit, corporate and director information from around the globe in seconds. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Liam Chennells, Founder...

Timo Lehes, Co-founder, Swarm   Digitising financial products opens new opportunities for investment. Regulated multi-asset DeFi platform, Swarm, is helping its customer base diversify their portfolios with tokens representing asset classes from both crypto and traditional financial markets. IBSi’ Reporter Gaia Lamperti interviewed Swarm’s Co-founder Timo Lehes about the company’s approach to toke...

Eduardo Chazan, CEO, Collegia Meet your customers where they want to be, and the place they are likely to want to be in the future is in the metaverse. FinTechs and established financial services groups need to be considering their future communications strategy now. Eduardo Chazan, CEO of pensions FinTech Collegia, speaks to Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence. Collegia is the first pension provider...

Tony Craddock, Director General, The Payments Association A report by The Payments Association suggests that FinTechs are increasingly focussed on ethical and sustainable growth. New paradigms such as ethical and sustainable growth (ESG) and stakeholder capitalism mean that FinTechs are seeking to strike a balance between profits and sustainability. The report, Sustainability Superheroes: a how-to...

Layla White, Founder, Tech Passport , & Isabel Pitt, Head of Core Services, Zopa Bank It is perhaps inevitable that the process of bringing a bank and FinTech to work together can be a slow one. But there are ways of making it run more smoothly and speedily. Robin Amlôt speaks to Isabel Pitt, Head of Core Services at Zopa Bank and Layla White (pictured), Founder of Tech Passport, a new supplie...

Stefano Vaccino, Founder & CEO, Yapily   Over the last 12 months, open banking maturity has soared across Europe, according to new research published in Yapily’s annual European Open Banking League Table . The UK is leading the way for the second year running, with now 6 million active open banking users, as per the latest statistics from the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE). Yapily’s...

Pat Bermingham, CEO, Adflex Straight-through-processing (STP) is buyer-initiated, removing the processing burden from the supplier and allowing prompt reconciliation of transactions and greater control over cash flow, not to mention added security and process efficiency. These advantages are being thrown into stark focus at present, given the current unsettled global economy and offer benefits to...

Ed Adshead-Grant, Board Advisor - Fintech & Payments, Bottomline Technologies The payments industry is starting to recover from Covid-19, with 48% of businesses looking to continue making international payments in 2022 and beyond. About 18% of businesses are now accepting BNPL as a payment method while 62% of them are starting to show interest in CBDCs.  These are just some of the latest findi...

Omar Mansur, Enterprise Lead – Global Projects, Codebase Technologies & Adrian Desouza, Senior Consultant, Cedar Management Consulting International The twin challenges of digital literacy and financial literacy come under the spotlight in this discussion about how technology vendors, financial institutions and regulators need to work together. A concerted effort is needed to drive financial i...

James Butland, Vice President of Financial Services, Airwallex Establishing an ecommerce platform is one step forward for a business. Gaining the ability to accept local payments in a global marketplace opens even greater prospects for growth, allowing companies to do business around the world, in the markets that your customers want to use and giving them familiar ways in which to pay for your go...

Bhairav Trivedi, CEO, Crown Agents Bank Crown Agents Bank was originally established by the British Crown and has been providing banking services from its London base since 1833. Mostly operating in developing markets including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Asia Pacific, the bank is now on a journey pursuing considerable digital transformation to streamline operations. CEO Bhairav T...

Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, CEO, iBanFirst Belgium-based payment institution iBanFirst announced the takeover of UK FX provider Cornhill International Payments late in June. The acquisition builds on iBanFirst’s long-term funding partnership with private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners and represented an opportunity for the financial services provider to expand its international footprint and ext...

Marc Hauser, Head of Europe, F10   This year, the global metaverse market is expected to rise to $47.48 billion and, according to research from Gartner , a quarter of people will most likely spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse by 2026. Marc Hauser, Head of F10 Europe, discusses how the rise of the metaverse will shape the future of financial services, from the legacy banks to the FinTec...

Rajesh Narasimha, CEO, Clayfin Technologies Digital 2.0 is the next step in digital banking, according to Rajesh Narasimha, CEO of Clayfin Technologies. With Digital 1.0 seeing the establishment of internet, mobile and omnichannel banking, Narasimha believes Digital 2.0 solutions look beyond the bank to offer a comprehensive view of the customer and the creation of partnerships, ecosystems, and al...

Raf de Kimpe, CEO, FinTech Week London FinTech Week London has launched an investigation into FinTech valuations and funding. Record levels of investment in 2021 have been followed by sharp declines in 2022 with firms struggling to raise fresh funding. This has led to reports of falling valuations, fire sales, layoffs and recruitment freezes. What’s truly going on and what will it mean for the evo...

Dharmarajan S, Chief Executive Officer, Director and co-Founder, Impactsure Technologies Impactsure Technologies has been recognised in the IBSi Sales League Table 2022 for ‘Star Performance’ in Transaction Banking (Trade Finance). The company’s focus on leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a trade finance solution has resulted in significant deals in Indi...

Blair McPherson, Head, Capital Introductions & Managing Director, Profilir (Apex Group) Capital introduction is modernising with the emergence of ‘digital capital introduction’, virtual marketing, capital raising, and investor relations capabilities fit for the 21st century. Investors expect to supplement in-person meetings with digital platform solutions. Private equity and the private market...