IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

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...

Joost van Houten, Chief Executive Officer, Sentinels Fenergo, which supplies digital KYC and CLM solutions recently acquired transaction monitoring platform Sentinels, which aims to streamline AML and transaction monitoring workflows for financial institutions, with the aim of increasing fraud protection and reducing false positives. Robin Amlôt of IBS intelligence speaks to Joost van Houten, CEO...

Gadi Mazor, Chief Executive Officer, Biocatch Advanced behavioural biometrics are the new frontier in financial fraud prevention. Increasing evidence of authorised push payment fraud may be a sign that the banks are winning the battle against fraudsters on other fronts, but the human side of fraud is harder to manage. With behavioural biometrics it is possible to flag up potential APP fraud as it...

Rob Straathof, Chief Executive Officer, Liberis As an SME lending FinTech, Liberis has provided financing to SMEs across Europe, the US and the UK since it launched in 2007. Liberis has also supported the creation of over 50,000 UK jobs to date by advancing £570 million to more than 18,000 businesses through its embedded finance business model. The platform enables payment processors, acquirers, a...

David Brown, Founder & CEO, Hi Pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, combined with the spike in energy costs caused by the war in Ukraine, have sparked a global cost-of-living crisis that is driving a rethink of the monthly pay cycle. Hi , a UK-based social enterprise FinTech recently teamed up with Norway-based Zalaris to offer a flexible payroll solution to firms across the globe. Robin Amlô...

Linh C Ho, Chief Marketing Officer, Zelros According to the US Federal Highway Administration, the average US driver clocks up around 11,500 miles per year. In this nascent age of artificial intelligence, data derived from driving habits – telematics insurance – offers the potential for personalised, usage-based insurance. This can be linked either to how you drive or as and when you drive. And th...

Christoffer Malmer, Head of SEBx, SEB Group SEBx was founded in 2018 by Nordic corporate bank SEB Group with the purpose of exploring new technologies and developing new customer offerings. It claims to combine the speed, agility, and legacy-free infrastructure of a FinTech startup, with the trust, experience, capital, licence, and knowledge of an incumbent bank. SEB recently entered a strategic p...

Steven Strange, Head of Product (Asset Management), ION Markets What will sustainable investment look like in a post-pandemic world? Solutions that enable the seamless integration of rules into trading systems are essential to buy-side firms looking to maintain a competitive edge. Transition to the cloud could remove issues associated with investment compliance. With the need for seamless complian...

Vince Graziani, Chief Executive Officer, IDEX Biometrics Focus groups from the European Central Bank’s investigation into digital currencies show that consumers want a digital euro to be as flexible as the fiat euro. In many ways the technology developed in the creation of cryptocurrencies may well lend itself to the development of fiat digital currencies with an added layer of security and, there...

Peter Woeste Christensen, Director, Lucht Probst Associates GmbH (LPA)  Peter Woeste Christensen, Director at capital markets technology and consulting firm LPA, believes that the rise of CBDCs has the potential to completely replace the current corresponding banking model. A shift from physical cash to CBDCs could move the current deposit model to a pure custody model, where banks no longer have...

Louisa Murray, COO UK & Europe, Railsr The first wave of FinTech has digitised conventional financial services, most notably through neobanks that have improved the consumer banking experience and educated large sections of the population to trust banking beyond legacy banks. However, the needle had not moved enough, according to Louisa Murray, COO UK & Europe, Railsr. She believes that Fi...

Carlos León, Director of Financial Markets Infrastructures and Digital Currencies Solutions, FNA Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the EU has imposed a number of financial sanctions and restrictions targeting Russia’s major banks, freezing assets and banning the country from the international bank messaging system SWIFT. But what will be the significance and future ramifications of these...

Brian Kaas, President & Managing Director, CMFG Ventures CMFG Ventures is the venture capital arm of CUNA Mutual Group, a credit union partner since 1935. More than 95% of US credit unions count on CUNA Mutual Group for a range of financial products and services. The VC unit has some 27 portfolio companies and has invested $240 million. Brian Kaas, President and Managing Director of CMFG Ventu...

Sendi Young, Managing Director Europe, Ripple   The European FinTech space has seen a boom in recent years, with the UK in particular, fuelling huge growth in the sector. In the first half of 2021 alone, FinTech investment in the region reached $39 billion according to KPMG. In conversation with Sendi Young, MD Europe at Ripple, IBSi’s Reporter Gaia Lamperti discussed how this momentum translated...

Tamer Al Mauge, Managing Director MENA, Codebase Technologies; Pankul Verma, Principal, Cedar Management Consulting International  Why are there so few standalone neobanks in the MENA region and why have so many traditional banks there launched neobank subsidiaries? Is the region overbanked as many have claimed and what does it take for a neobank in MENA to be regarded as a success? Robin Amlôt of...

Landon Glenn, Founder & CEO, ASA Technologies FinTechs are very good at leveraging data to serve affinity groups, but they are, by and large, not bankers and nor do most of them want to be bankers. Collaborative banking is a concept being promoted as a solution that removes any compliance and regulatory burden from FinTechs, allowing them to focus on their core competencies while creating a ro...

Omar Shaikh, Founder & CEO, Cocoa Invest   Several regulators around the world operate sandbox environments. What benefits does going through this process bring for the FinTechs involved? Cocoa Invest is an Islamic digital wealth manager and recently completed its time in the Central Bank of Bahrain’s sandbox. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence discusses what the FinTech gained from the experienc...

Brian McKenney, Chief Innovation Officer, HSBC ; Angus Ross, Chief Growth & Revenue Officer BaaS, Finastra Research canvassing the opinions of 1,600 senior industry executives reveals the true extent of the appetite for BaaS (Banking as a Service), with almost 85% of respondents already implementing or planning to implement BaaS over the next 12-18 months. More than 80% of regulated financial...