IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

Kelly Parkhurst, Head of Product Design, Absa The adoption of FinTech in Africa has been widespread. Looking back on 2021, FinTechs in Africa overshadowed all other startups in funding, raising close to $5 billion. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence speaks to Kelly Parkhurst, Head of Product Design for African financial services group Absa about how the continent can leverage the growth of FinTech to...

Chermaine Hu, Co-Founder and CFO, Episode Six According to a recent study commissioned by Texas-based payments technology company Episode Six, by 2030, 74% of consumer payments will be handled by non-traditional financial service providers. This means that financial institutions will have to equip themselves with a ‘future-ready’ payments infrastructure that enable payments anywhere and everywhere...

Tony Craddock, Director General, The Payments Association The 10th annual Pay360 event, hosted by The Payments Association, took place on 22 March in London. The event brought together some 1,500 representatives from across the payments’ ecosystem. Tony Craddock, Director General of The Payments Association discusses what was on the agenda with Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence.

Charles McManus, CEO, ClearBank After securing a £175 million equity investment, in a round led by funds advised by Apax Digital, and with the participation of CFFI UK Ventures Ltd and PPF Financial Holdings BV, clearing and embedded banking platform ClearBank is set to accelerate international growth and expand its range of product and services. IBSi’s Reporter Gaia Lamperti interviewed CEO Charl...

Isabelle Bouille, Principal Product Manager, BNY Mellon The migration later this year to the new data-rich financial messaging standard ISO 20022 will transform global payments, revolutionising how banks process transactions with more robust, structured and comprehensive payment messages. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence discusses the ISO 20022 migration with Isabelle Bouille, Principal Product Man...

Carol Houle, SVP, Global Head of Financial Services & Insurance, Atos ; Olaf Badstuebner, Risk & Compliance Partner, Atos Some 2%-5% of global GDP is estimated to be laundered annually – ‘a clear and present threat’ to the financial system according to EU Commissioner for Financial Services Mairead McGuinness. What is the role of emerging digital technologies in combatting fraud and financ...

Carol Hamilton, SVP Global Solutions at Provenir Provenir, a provider of AI-powered risk decisioning software, recently released the findings of a survey that showed only 18% of FinTechs and financial services institutions believe their credit risk models are accurate at least 75% of the time. The study also highlighted a growing appetite for AI predictive analytics and machine learning data integ...

Tamer Al Mauge, Managing Director MENA, Codebase Technologies   The banking and financial services sector around the world faces a large and still growing regulatory regime from both domestic and international regulators. Tamer Al Mauge, Managing Director MENA of Codebase Technologies speaks to Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence about the regulatory environment in the MENA region and the challenges f...

Nadia Edwards-Dashti, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Harrington Starr and published author  In her +10 years of experience working as a recruiter placing technologists in the financial services industry, Nadia Edwards-Dashti, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Harrington Starr, has witnessed the wins and the losses of the efforts to make FinTech inclusive and accessible to all. In...

Ana Quirola, Business Development, Strategic Partnerships and Commercial Channels Manager, COBIS At the latest Global FinTech Innovation Awards, COBIS, a leading core banking solutions provider in the Latin American market, won the award for Most Innovative Cloud Deployment for Banco Santander Peru’s SURGIR project. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence discusses the solution behind the award, COBIS Ser...

Sandeep Bagaria, Chief Executive Officer, Tagit Tagit works with banks in Asia, the Middle East and Africa to bring their digital strategy to life with secure and scalable omnichannel digital solutions. The company picked up the award for Most Effective Bank-FinTech Partnership at the last Global FinTech Innovation Awards for its project with India’s AU Small Finance Bank. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intel...

Altin Kadareja, Founder & CEO, CardoAI Ask anyone in in the private debt market just how big it is, and you’ll get different answers each time, but it is big, opaque, and not standardised. And Europe accounts for around two-thirds of it. On the buyside, institutional investors, banks and credit servicers need to improve how they manage private debt investments, and on the sellside, corporates...

Paul Nilsen, Commercial Director, MD Africa, CIS & Global SaaS, Codebase Technologies Interest is growing in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in order to meet the needs and expectations of the next generation of consumers, not least in Africa, which has the youngest population. It is estimated that 70% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is under the age of 30. Robin Amlôt of IBS Int...

Kosta Du, CEO, Dapio The coming ‘Tap to Pay’ smartphone payments tech wave, reinforced by Apple’s recent announcement of turning iPhones into payment terminals, offers an instant service at the tap of a mobile device. What will this mean for merchants, especially small/micro businesses, gig economy workers and sole traders? We discussed the potential for this solution to make payments more accessi...

Marina Goche, CEO, Sentifi Sentifi is one of the leaders in the fast-growing alternative data sector and its data and analysis are formed from millions of different online sources, including forums like Reddit as well as blogs and social media. The company’s data are already being used by a range of institutional and retail investors to better understand the underlying price signals and sentiment...

Jason O’Shaughnessy, Head of International Business, Envestnet/Yodlee Financial wellness for many is currently at risk. The combination of the aftereffects of the pandemic and of a spike in energy prices because of the war in Ukraine are hitting consumers hard. Financial literacy remains an issue and, there is an onus on financial institutions and FinTechs to help. Banks may use data analytics to...

Anurag Sinha, Co-Founder & CEO, FPL Technologies FPL Technologies is a FinTech startup based in Pune, India. The firm has two products, the app based credit card OneCard and OneScore, an app that allows consumers to monitor and improve their credit scores. The firm recently completed its Series C funding round, raising $75 million. Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence spoke with FPL Technologies’ C...

Igal Rotem, Chief Executive Officer, Finaro Payments’ provider Finaro is being acquired by Shift4 in a deal valuing the company at $575 million. The takeover follows just a few short months after a rebranding exercise in which Finaro became the new name for Credorax. Together, Shift4 and Finaro are leading players in both card-present and card-not-present experience across a range of verticals. No...

Laurent Descout, Founder & CEO, Neo With the one-year anniversary of the end of the Brexit transition period, we take a look at what’s changed in the world of cross-border payments as a result of Brexit. That’s in the past, looking to the present and the future we also investigate how the war in Ukraine is affecting payments and international corporates with Laurent Descout, Founder and CEO of...

Michael Vrontamitis, Lead Industry Principal, Lending Business Unit, Finastra After a 25-year career in trade finance, including as co-Chair of the ICC Banking Commission’s digitalisation in trade finance working group, Michael Vrontamitis joined Finastra as Lead Industry Principal of the tech provider’s Lending Business Unit. He discusses the tech opportunities and challenges in corporate banking...

Liam Jeffs, Sales Director, Icon Solutions Icon Solutions’ IPF is a cloud-native, collaborative payments platform. The firm recently won the award for ‘most impactful project in the category Best Payment Hub/Wholesale Payments Implementation in the 3rd Global FinTech Innovation Awards. The project was for the implementation of IPF for BNP Paribas. Liam Jeffs, Sales Director at Icon Solutions discu...

Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director, FINOS In January 2022, the White House convened an important cross-section of the Open Source developer and commercial ecosystem with top officials that saw the Linux Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium, reinforcing the importance Open Source Security in financial services. Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS, the financial sector arm of...

Tom Bentley, Chief Commercial Officer, Vodeno Retailers are increasingly stepping into the financial services space by embedding financial products within their customer experience. What does that mean for banks and BaaS? Which services will flourish? Tom Bentley, Chief Commercial Officer of Vodeno believes the ones to watch are decoupled debit, B2B BNPL and merchant financing. He outlined the pot...

Jean-Philippe Bersier, Director, Business Development; Benoît Jacquat, Director, ERI   ERI won twice at the IBSi Global Fintech Innovation Awards 2021. Both awards recognised its work with Stern International Bank in the US. ERI’s solutions offered a one stop-shop covering all business functions and enabled Stern International Bank to have a master online account with the New York Federal Reserve...

Matthew Coquillon, CEO and Co-Founder, Mama Money The international remittances market in South Africa is estimated at around $1.9 billion per annum, a figure that excludes the country’s vibrant informal money transfer segment, and that is based on an expanding migrant population of about 3.2 million. Mama Money, a Cape Town-headquartered social business and money transfer operator, helps foreign...