eXponential Finance

Hugo Phillion is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Flare Network. Earlier in his career, Hugo was a commodity derivatives portfolio manager. When he got bored with traditional finance, he went on to study machine learning at University College London, where he met his two co-founders. Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our aud...

Aaron McDonald is the Chief Executive Officer of Futureverse, a technological and cultural foundation for the open metaverse where creators, companies and communities conjure their future. The Futureverse infrastructure enables companies and creators to deliver the open metaverse experience that they want for their audience. A seamless portal in and out of all apps in the metaverse, Futureverse al...

Masako Shiba is a New York base art professional with near two decades of experience, including at Sotheby’s NY, Japan Society Gallery, Asia Society Museum, and Asian Cultural Council where she was inaugural director for ACC Japan Foundation. Since the pandemic, she has co-founded ONBD, a web3 art & culture platform, also co-founded BEAF an experimental art foundation, and is Chief Artistic Di...

Phillip Lord is the President of Oobit. Oobit allows consumers to pay with crypto on existing Visa and Mastercard point of sale (POS) terminals with merchants receiving fiat money settlements the same way as other credit card payments. Phillip has more than 25 years experience in global capital markets, where he has invested and structured deals in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. He also has g...

Yoann Turpin is a Co-Founder of Wintermute, focused on Business Development and Ventures. Wintermute is a leading algorithmic liquidity provider in the digital asset space. Before starting Wintermute with his two co-founders, Yoann spent more than a decade in trading, investing, advising startups and building a few businesses. Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interestin...

Anjali Young is the Co-Founder of Collab. Land, an automated member management system for tokenized communities. Over 50,000 projects use Collab. Land as their primary tool for community management. Anjali has a 30+ year history with online communities as a creator, member, and in leadership. She has also worked as a lawyer, adjunct professor, and early tech startup employee. In addition to her in...

Anton Golub is a crypto serial entrepreneur and ecosystem builder. Anton founded & served as CEO of flovtec, a Swiss market-maker providing liquidity solutions to digital asset exchanges, token issuers & protocols and offering investment products for professional & institutional investors. Anton is also a co-founder of Trust Square AG, a pre-eminent blockchain technology hub located in...

Dean McClelland is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tontine Trust, a lifetime income solution. We had the pleasure of hosting Dean before, at our fifteenth Tokyo FinTech Meetup in 2018. This podcast is an edited version of our 182nd meetup. Five years have passed, and the focus has moved from Asia to Europe and now the US, where the launch is expected shortly. Produced in collaboration w...

Vishal Dalal is the International CEO at Pismo, a next generation banking and cards technology provider, founded in 2016 in Brazil. Previously a Partner at McKinsey, Vishal has worked in India, Singapore, Australia, and the UK. He discusses with us the origins and culture of Pismo, its positioning in the global next gen core banking market, the competitive advantage of product-focused software eng...

Swaap v2 is a non-custodial RfQ market-making infrastructure. It provides optimal liquidity services with built-in defensive modules – or "safeguards” – allowing for on-chain max drawdown circuit breaker, last look, and other dynamic forms of funds protection. LPs passively benefit from state-of-the-art market-making strategies originating from the stochastic control theory. Liquidity pools a...

Masa Kikuchi is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Secured Finance. Masa is a former head of interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives structuring turned computer scientist, an evangelist of web3 technologies, and a task force member of the trusted web at the cabinet secretariat of Japan. Secured Finance is on a mission to bring transparency, security, and robustness to the world of f...

Lisa Nestor is the Chief Strategy Officer at Air TM. Lisa has spent her professional career researching, and then building solutions that economically empower individuals by improving their ability to access and participate in financial markets. At Airtm, Lisa is leveraging her background in digital assets, payments and ecosystem development to continue the expansion of Airtm’s digital dollar acco...

Benjamin Quinlan is the CEO and Managing Partner of Quinlan & Associates. He is the former Chairman of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong and currently chairs the Innovation & Technology Committee at the Australian Chamber of Commerce. In this conversation, we are taking a deep dive into a recently published Quinlan & Associates research report on the APAC Digital Banking Landscape,...

Sam Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Smartpay, the first all-in-one payment experience and interest free buy now pay later solution built to solve Japanese consumer payment issues and improve merchant conversion rates. Sam is recognized as one of Asia Pacific premier digital economy leaders and investors, and has been on 4 Asia Pacific Executive Leadership Teams for USD +$20 billion businesses b...

Sherry Jiang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bluejay Finance. Previously, Sherry led growth and incentives marketing for Google Pay in India, where the product grew from 13m to more than 120m monthly active users. She started up Bluejay in 2021 to push the envelope even more when it comes to financial inclusion, outside of existing banking rails. Bluejay helps investors get access to diversified and...

HomeDAO is the foundation of a network of technology entrepreneurs who live and build together. They have five hacker houses in Oxford and equip founders with all the resources necessary to make visions become reality. Our conversation with Josh Lavorini, HomeDAO Co-Founder, and outdoteth, HomeDAO members traverses a wide range of topics: - Introduction to HomeDAO - Winning the ETHGlobal Hackathon...

Ben Gleisner is the Founder and Global CEO at CoGo. Previously in a government role, Ben led the team that created Treasury's Living Standards Framework, and represented Treasury on New Zealand Government's International Climate Change negotiating team. Earlier this year, Ben was recognized as the Most Impactful Entrepreneur at the Pacific Basin Economic Council. Cogo is a carbon footprint...

Padmini Gupta is an award-winning banker and a World Economic Forum Global Leadership Fellow, who is now re-imagining financial services for 250 million migrant workers worldwide, and the billion people who depend on them through Rise, and now Xare.  At the heart of finance is a big secret, that all financial products were built for income earners, but only 1/3rd of the world works and they s...

Dr. Sahin is a fully qualified German Lawyer with more than 15 years work experiences, financial regulatory and corporate legal affairs in Ireland, Germany and Japan with high knowledge in Japanese Law and its legal framework and business. He is currently seconded to KPMG Japan. Dr. Sahin has earned his PhD in comparative law by analyzing Japanese insurance law, identifying influences and contrast...

Betterdata won the Silver Medal at the Tokyo Financial Awards 2022 (hosted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government) in the Financial Innovation category! Betterdata is a Singapore-based startup that applies Generative AI to create synthetic data that is privacy-preserving. This can be used to simulate ‘what-if’ situations for analysis, remove biases from datasets and enable open access to data with 1...

Charles d’Haussy is the CEO of the dydx Foundation, an independent not-for-profit foundation created to promote dYdX, the most powerful decentralized cryptocurrency exchange protocol. Previously, Charles was Global Head of Business Development at ConsenSys, a leading blockchain engineering company and the Head of Fintech with the Hong Kong government. In our conversation, naturally, we cover the s...

Jonas Thürig is the Head of Tenity, a FinTech Incubator and Accelerator, in Singapore. Tenity has the mission to unite tech startups with big business to shape the future in banking and insurance. Previously Jonas worked at the Embassy of Switzerland in China as the Deputy Head of the Science, Technology, Education and Innovation Section. He also founded his own startup, and worked for the Swiss S...

Nicholas Wilde is the Managing Director APAC at Thought Machine. In his role, Nick works with banks and fintech firms to help them implement a built-for-purpose modern core – Vault - at the heart of their business. Vault, built by former Google engineers, helps organizations to solve some of the hardest problems in banking, discard the shackles of their legacy systems and reimagine their business...

Rob Leslie is one of Ireland’s most well-known technology entrepreneurs. He is the Founder and CEO at Sedicii, and a Co-Founder and President of Nillion. Rob started working on zero knowledge proofs in 2011, and founded Sedicii in 2013, with the aim of creating the world's first distributed, public utility to facilitate the storage and processing of all kinds of data without the need to expose or...

Jan Denecke is the Co-Founder and CEO of twelve by twelve, a Berlin-based startup at the intersection of Web3 and music. We will discuss in depth about what impact Web3 technologies will have, and also about how regulated securities token can support project financing in the music industry. twelve x twelve combines expertise from different markets into an innovative online platform that transforms...