IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

Manish Maakan, Chief Executive Officer, iGTB Commercial Banking is on the cusp of fundamental shifts that will dramatically reorder the industry in the coming decade. As banks assess their future strategies, they need to define their purpose and set a course not just for modernisation, but for true transformation. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence spoke with Manish Maakan, CEO of global transaction...

Tamás Erni, Chairman and Head of Sales, Loxon ; Ádám Kocsis, Head of Professional Services, Loxon   With an uncertain macroeconomic outlook, lending institutions are coming under building pressure with loans threatening to turn problematic. The debt collection industry is also undergoing change – among the factors accelerating this transformation are changes in customer behaviour, inflation, unpre...

Gavin Maclean, Head of Payments, CIB, Lloyds Banking Group How is corporate banking changing? Trends that have been in place over the last decade were accelerated by the pandemic but what is happening now and next? And how are they changing a bank’s internal processes and the customer experience? Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Gavin Maclean, Head of Payments, CIB at Lloyds Banking Group...

Georges Archibald, Chief Innovation Officer & Regional Head of North America, Apex Group Traditionally, valuing real estate, private equity, infrastructure, and private credit assets has been an opaque and time-consuming process. Using blockchain and artificial intelligence offers the potential to increase trust in the underlying data and provide an auditable data trail. A trusted data layer c...

Niccolò Gamaleri, Senior Director, Royal Park Partners As the FinTech sector becomes increasingly regulated, and its funding base evolves, knowledge of regulatory requirements and financing solutions is crucial. Ex-Barclays Niccolò Gamaleri, recently appointed Senior Director at financial advisory firm Royal Park Partners, discusses how FinTech's continued growth is increasingly requiring the...

Anuj Kumar Sen, Co-Founder & CTO, Cuelebre AB Success in the implementation of AI and ML depends on having a foundation system that can scale and serve your data. Cuelebre is an end-to-end technology services provider that caters to data analytics needs. The company focuses on building strategies, architecting platforms, and deploying dashboards in the cloud or on-premises. Anuj Kumar Sen, Co-...

Jasmeet Chhabda, Senior Vice President, Lentra With the clear intent of creating a smoother digital lending process Lentra is offering new-age lending solutions to the Indian financial services sector. Jasmeet Chhabda, Senior Vice President at Lentra discusses how the firm has created a range of offerings across embedded journeys, BNPL, credit card journeys, small ticket loans, co-lending and more...

Simone Mazzuca, Founder and CEO, Wallex   How can the evolution of banking lead to more democratised financial services offered to a broader base of individuals that are in need of better banking? In this episode, Simone Mazzuca, CEO and Founder of Wallex, discusses how blockchain technology will transform banking as we know it. In his view, the bank of the future should embrace multi-currency fia...

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...