IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

Jim Rosenthal, Co-Founder & CEO, BlueVoyant How do you quantify the biggest cybersecurity threats facing your business, and how should you be responding to ensure business resiliency in the face of geopolitical risk and the dangers of a potential recession? Who should be taking the lead in your business to tackle this issue, how involved should senior management and the board be, and how far d...

Stephen Wright, Head of Regulation & Standards, Bank of APIs , NatWest Open banking now has 7 million customers in the UK who, for the most part don’t know they are using open banking capabilities. But most of what they are doing does not earn the banks any money! So the question becomes what can bankers do to monetise open banking, and build on what has been developed into a sustainable busin...

Tony Craddock, Director General, The Payments Association With more than 1,800 attendees and an 80% increase in the number of exhibitors, PAY360 2023 was The Payments Association’s largest event yet. The event shapes payment strategy and policy, bringing together policy makers, innovators, and users. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Tony Craddock, Director General of The Payments Associat...

Muraleedhar Pai, Executive Director, Maveric Systems  Banks are undergoing digital transformation as a result of digitisation. It has become the sine qua non of almost every action, from basic corporate procedures to client engagement and trading. Although corporate banking has begun to digitise, it is still in its infancy. Due to the unfettered flow of data among banks, their clients, and third p...

Omar Jordan, Founder & CEO, Coviance The US home equity lending process has barely changed in the last 50 years. Aiming to disrupt this, Coviance, established in 2015, operates a cloud-based platform that speeds up and simplifies the lending process with, among other developments, an automated valuation model that delivers results in a matter of seconds rather than relying on a system of appra...

Slaven Bilac, CEO, Agent IQ Banks face a variety of pain points but one that is common to all is hiring. With millennials and GenZs becoming the majority of the workforce, preferences professed by these demographics are becoming a more prominent factor in the challenges posed by the issue of employee satisfaction. Banks seeking to develop digital solutions need to consider the impact technology is...

Michael Amar, Co-Founder & Chairman, Paris Blockchain Week   Paris Blockchain Week is dedicated to professionals in the blockchain and Web3 space. The 4th edition takes place as a live event 20-24 March 2023, at the Carrousel du Louvre. This year the event already has 400+ speakers booked and 300+ sponsors. So what may we expect from Paris Blockchain week? Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speak...

Mandi McReynolds, Global Head of ESG, Workiva   Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in making investment decisions are key to supporting the transition to a greener and more sustainable future. What was once financially immaterial to business and finance is becoming material today and into the future – this process, in a term introduced a couple of years ago at the World Economic Fo...

Daniel Harman, Co-Founder, Darksquare Capital   As but one example of how alternative assets can outperform, over the 15 years to 2021, UK forestry generated an annualised return of 18.9%, while the FTSE 100 averaged 9.2% over the same period. Portfolio diversification will be a key trend in investment in the future. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence discusses the FinTech trends driving a focus on a...

Kealan Lennon, Founder & CEO, CleverCards Through a customisable and configurable Digital Mastercard, used by public and private sector organisations of all sizes, the CleverCards payments platform enables instant payments without the need for a bank account. Businesses may make payments for all their business requirements – from paying out employee benefits to paying consultants, and from pay...

Mushegh Tovmasyan, Chairman & Founder, Zenus Bank Zenus Bank is claiming a mission to democratise finance by offering people in developing nations a secure alternative to holding funds in local currencies. Unlike the vast majority of banks in the international banking system, Zenus is a full reserve bank, meaning deposits are retained and not loaned out.  So, what is the significance of an int...

Paul Brown, COO, TechPassport The bank/FinTech landscape is changing but establishing a working relationship can be a slow process of investigation and due diligence, potentially negating the advantages of speed and agility that FinTechs can offer. But with a list of enterprise ready questions (ERQs), TechPassport is aiming to simplify and speed up the engagement process. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intell...

Rick Woodham, Head of Product Management & Business Solutions, Tagit Yet again it appears that banks are in danger of overlooking the opportunities presented in the SME segment. Attention is now focusing on the corporate banking sector after some years of digital development in retail banking, but are SMEs and even micro SMEs being served as they should be? Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence spea...

Paul Thomalla, Head of Industry & Regulatory Affairs, Finastra ; and Craig Wellman, Managing Director Financial Services, Microsoft The number of banking payments in the UK processed via the current Faster Payments regime grew from 2020 to 2021 by 3.6 billion and this is a figure that is only going to grow. The replacement scheme, the New Payments Architecture should be in place in 2024. What...

Kathy Gormley, Principal Solutions Engineer, Resistant. AI The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 2-5% of global GDP is laundered each year. The threat to FinTechs from financial crime is very real, so what can FinTechs of all sizes do to fight this? The answer would appear to be to embrace the opportunities presented by the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help iden...

Omar Mansur, Managing Director APAC, Codebase Technologies Half of the population over the age of 15 in countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) do not have a bank account. That’s a serious drag on potential economic development and growth. What needs to be done? Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Omar Mansur, Managing Director APAC for Codebase Technologies.

Kalpesh Mistry, SVP & Head of BFSI Europe, ITC Infotech The bank of the future and its products are likely to be very different to the institutions we are familiar with today. Cloud-native Banking as a Service will change how the bank operates and the kind of services it provides to its customers. But perhaps the future of banking rests mainly on the proper management of data to shape and focu...

Rob O’Farrell, CTO, ID-Pal Despite frequent incidents of data breaches, many of us are still unaware of or ambivalent about what organisations hold our data. A self-sovereign identity profile could allow individuals to take back control of their data. How would this work in practice? Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Rob O’Farrell, Chief Technology Officer of identity verification provider...

Rohit Garg, CEO & Co-Founder, SmartCoin Smartcoin is stimulating MSMEs’ and individuals’ development and financial inclusion in India through the application of AI/ML in financial services. The firm aims to provide accessible loans to customers, especially those who reside in Tier-II and III markets while keeping default rates low. Puja Sharma of IBS Intelligence spoke to the firm’s CEO and Co...

Victor Basta, CEO, DAI Magister After a slowdown in FinTech investing in the latter part of 2022, we review the outlook for FinTech funding in 2023 and what FinTechs need to do to create a successful exit strategy. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Victor Basta, CEO of investment bank DAI Magister about what private equity and venture capital players are looking for in a FinTech, and the i...

Christian Frahm, Founder & CEO, United FinTech United FinTech is a new type of FinTech entity, not private equity, not venture capital but building an ecosystem of best-in-class FinTech businesses into a single ecosystem and solutions provider to corporate and investment banks active in the capital markets. Christian Frahm, the firm’s Founder and CEO tells Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence that...

Henrik Rosvall, Co-Founder & CEO, Dreams Technology Nobody does banking for the sake of banking – managing money is not an end-goal in itself. What banking customers need is access to tools and feature that help boost their financial health. Traditional personal financial management tools and financial literacy models just don’t provide the motivation that individuals need. So, what does? Robi...

Will Tumulty, CEO & President, Rapid Finance   Around a fifth of all new SMEs fail within the first 12 months and the number one dilemma facing small businesses is lack of access to working capital. While not every business can be saved and made a success, we suggest that there is more that innovative FinTech lenders can do that banks cannot or will not.  Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks...

Kundan Shekhawat, CEO & Founder, Ascent Business Technology The implementation of technology solutions by the financial sector has increased the speed of financial decision-making and allowed for the dream of hyper personalisation. But it has also led to increased risk within the sector, making operational resilience (of which old-style business continuity is but a part) even more of a ‘must-h...

Dharmarajan Sankara Subrahmanian, Founder Director & CEO, Impactsure Impactsure, which was established in 2019, uses AI/ML and natural language processing technologies to build user-centric tools and scalable and secure solutions that process, classify and extract structured and unstructured data from documents. At the core of the company’s SureSuite of microservices is the patent pending Secu...