IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

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...

Rajesh Mirjankar, Chief Executive Officer, Kiya.ai Kiya.ai is the new identity for Infrasoft Technologies, together with the tag line ‘Digital future made real’. So, what is behind the new brand and what message is being sent by Kiya.ai, which describes itself as an ai-based omnichannel and open finance solution? Rajesh Mirjankar, CEO of Kiya.ai has embraced artificial intelligence and the opportu...

Al Lukies, CBE, Founder & CEO, Pollinate , and Chair of the FinTech Alliance Regulation is coming to the BNPL sector. That is inevitable but what will it mean and how will it impact the industry? What is certain is that a lucrative financial product has been established and that banks are late to the party. Some may say ‘again’. This underlines the importance of understanding the true value of...

Michael Chin, Chief Executive Officer, Broadway Technology Electronification is coming to the fixed income market, but fully automated trading is unlikely to replace human-to-human interaction completely. Quite simply the deals are too complex, too big and, in some cases, too illiquid to be easily encompassed by the kind of trading software solutions that dominate the equities markets. However, th...

Jeroen Plag, Head of Corporate Strategy, ING Group How can banks stay a step ahead of the changes and evolutions in the financial services world and deliver products that customers really need? What does “Innovation” mean in 2022 and how can it be implemented across different verticals? Jeroen Plag, Head of Corporate Strategy at ING Group, explains to Gaia Lamperti, IBS Intelligence’s Reporter, ho...

Sylvain Forté, Co-Founder & CEO, SESAMm What if you could analyse, in real-time, billions of articles and messages from the web using natural language processing techniques to identify key trends and investment opportunities in both private and public companies, as well as using AI and machine learning to build investment strategies? Well, you can. Sylvain Forté, Co-Founder and CEO of SESAMm e...

Barry Kirby, SVP Business Development & Sales, Cunexus ; Greg Bierl, SVP & Counsel, Compliance Systems Compliance Systems is a provider of financial transaction technology focusing on financial transaction data analysis and documentation. The firm has come together with Cunexus, which offers a digital storefront for financial institutions’ customers and members, addressing the need for a p...

Federico Baradello, Founder and CEO, Finalis The labour shortage issue in the financial services industry caused by the pandemic and widespread dissatisfaction with work-life balance has opened a unique opportunity for technology and service providers to step in and create a new era of FinTech banking services. Federico Baradello, Founder and CEO of Finalis, an investment-banking-as-a-service plat...

Reed Taussig, Chief Executive Officer, Outseer More than 17 million UK customers have used BNPL products, and many banks are moving into the field to compete with the likes of Klarna and Clearpay. Growth in fraud is inevitable, including the creation of fake accounts to purchase high-value items and the hijacking of existing customer accounts. So, what can be done to protect both merchants and con...