Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

Illia Polosukhin, Founder & CEO of NEAR Protocol, is this week’s guest on Searching for Mana. Following on from the brilliant earlier episode with Marieke Flamant, Lloyd gets to the bottom of building a company sitting at the forefront of this potential paradigm shift to web3.   Lloyd and Illia guide us through the technical intricacies of the platform, the wider NEAR ecosystem, building a leading...

From discussing the meaning of life, to the cruciality of atomic habits, to genuinely aiming to change the world, this week’s guest, Michael Gronager - CEO of crypto behemoth Chainalysis - shares fascinating insights. With a valuation of upwards of $8 Billion, following their latest funding round in May this year, Chainalysis is providing critical financial data to enable governments, banks and bl...

Sendi Young is the European Managing Director for global crypto payments leader Ripple, with  an extensive background across payments with traditional corporate powerhouses. Growing up  in Istanbul in the 1980s, Sendi’s background has helped her acclimatize to the volatility of the crypto world, becoming accustomed to cycles of economic growth and rapid declines, sparking  her curiosity and passio...

Eileen Burbidge is the founding partner of Passion Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund  that has backed FinTech giants including the likes of Monzo, Tide and GoCardless among  others. As part of Mana Search’s event presenting their State of Diversity report, Eileen joins  Lloyd to walk through the homogeneity and inequality within the current Tech and Venture  Capital industries. From the...

Arik Shtilman heads up global payments solution Rapyd – one of Europe’s most highly valued fintechs.  Arik’s first rung on the career ladder was the Israeli army, which taught him a ‘carpe diem’ approach to business that has since helped him win over investors and turn Rapyd into  Israel’s most valuable private company (it recently achieved a 15bn dollar valuation). Arik explains that the genesis...

The Searching for Mana show with Lloyd Wahed has featured several ‘one of a kind’ guests – and this show is no exception.  Wei Lei is not only a global leader for one of the biggest companies on the planet, she is also a two-time mathematical Olympiad who enjoys karaoke sessions, ran a marathon without training for it and overcame her fear of public speaking by taking part in an open mic comedy ni...

Being paid to get fit may sound too good to be true, but it’s exactly what this week’s Searching for Mana guest Ole Fomenko is doing for his app’s more than 70 milllion users.  Sweatcoin tracks a user’s steps and this summer will covert them into free crypto currency.  Watching a movie with his children was the inspiration for the app; his motivation for driving it lies in repenting for previous p...

As CEO of the NEAR protocol foundation, Marieke Flament is currently one of the most successful female leaders working in fintech. But it took some convincing for her to give up an established, super successful corporate career; she was even told she was ‘full on crazy’ for considering it. As she tells presenter Lloyd Wahed in this episode, she defied her critics to join Circle in 2015 where she s...

Rodolphe Ardant, CEO of French unicorn Spendesk, is this week’s guest on the Searching for Mana podcast.   Rodolphe enjoyed a peripatetic childhood moving around the world every three years due to his father’s career, and says this instilled in him a ‘sense of curiosity’.   Combined with the ‘autistic boredom’ he felt growing up, Rodolphe had a desire to create and build things from an early age,...

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsCfKLN1u1cL_luwY5qR4Yw Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/2Hhg4gB​​  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3kKZQKl Searching for Mana is a UK-based podcast which focuses on tech innovation in finance, and features interviews with influencers, leaders and founders in the fintech space, from unicorn companies to financial disruptors.  Previous guests have included the Dir...

In the first episode of season 4 of the Searching for Mana podcast, Brett Harrison, US president of leading crypto exchange platform FTX, talks to presenter Lloyd Wahed about the importance of regulation but also the need to take more risks; how staying small has helped FTX to play big; how he balances being a father and an enthusiastic pet owner (six dogs and five cats) with running one of the mo...

This is quite a story, listen to Zilch CEO and Co-Founder, Philip Belamant, British Entrepreneur of the year 2021, who has taken the business from series A to Unicorn faster than anyone else in Europe has managed with any other company. He and his team still have control of more than 50% of the equity, and their international expansion starts next year. Philip sat down with Lloyd Wahed CEO of Mana...

On this week’s Searching for Mana Lloyd Wahed CEO of Mana Search met with Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, the co-creators of the Tezos blockchain to discuss the development of the Tezos ecosystem and how it uses creativity, collaboration and a degree of democratisation to evolve this open-source platform. They see themselves very much as match makers and facilitators, bringing together developers wi...

Building anything that is going to survive and prosper requires a solid foundation and that is what Sean Lee CEO of the Algo Foundation described when he met Lloyd Wahed in this week’s Searching for Mana Podcast.  The Algo is the native token of the Algorand blockchain, and the Algo foundation helps users solve real-world problems using the Algo ecosystem which is based on four basic principles: S...

Ben Chemla CEO of Shares and Lloyd Wahed of Mana Search met to discuss how Shares is making share dealing a social activity and how Ben has learnt how to grow a company fast in a new market. The idea for Shares came from social investing, seeing friends chatting about their ideas and sharing views, having fun and learning from each other. He saw the opportunity to enable communities around making...

On this week’s Searching for Mana podcast, Jason Trost CEO of Smarkets and Lloyd Wahed discussed the evolution of Smarkets and how it is disrupting an old fashioned market in betting, and Jason’s own journey to create and lead this London based business from his early years growing up in the US. Smarkets is on a mission to make betting online easier and less expensive “to get out of the way” of th...

The consumer is driving up economic growth at an unprecedented rate around the world, and Claire Gates discussed with Lloyd Wahed in this week’s Searching for Mana podcast how the ease of paying for what you want to buy is a key part of that. Claire is the Chief Commercial Officer at the $1B+ valued PPRO a global provider of payments infrastructure that facilitates responsible credit transactions,...

Treating customers as equals, in simple terms, without talking down to them, is the vital communication strategy that is helping Bux offer it’s affordable and accessible broking services to a new generation of investors across Europe, and it’s going well explains Yorick Naeff (CEO of Bux) in conversation with Lloyd Wahed of Mana Search, so well that they recently raised $80m to take their service...

Lloyd Wahed met with David Jarvis, Founder and CEO of Griffin on the latest Searching for Mana podcast where they discussed the challenges of being the fintech’s OS for embedded finance. Griffin is building a Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform to support the fintech ecosystem, and as a new player it can look forward rather than having to be slowed by legacy. The best supplier is one that enables...

In the blink of an eye, Tink has gone from a B2C player in one country in Europe to a B2B solution in eighteen markets, giving them access to more than 250m customers in Europe. Rafa Plantier, Head of UK & Ireland at Tink describes to Lloyd Wahed how Tink is product growth led and their innovation is driving a rapid development in networks and services to providing accessibility for millions of pe...

Myles Stephenson (Founder & CEO, Modulr) sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his company provides payments infrastructure to the likes of Revolut, Sage, Liberis, iwoca or Salary Finance, enabling them to efficiently automate and embed payments transactions. After receiving a biochemistry degree at the University of Oxford, Myles developed his expertise in finance and retail building up the char...

This week, Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer comes back to Searching for Mana to join Lloyd for an enlightening chat about fintech, crypto, altcoins and so much more! A financial veteran with over 20 years’ experience, who previously co-founded Starling Bank in 2015, or later served as UK MD at Gemini, Julian offers incredible insight into both blockchain and financial services in general. Bitstamp is th...

This week, TokenGuard CEO and Founder Kamil Gorski joins Mimi Nguyen, our R&D Head for an enlightening chat about due diligence in blockchain, smart contracts, ICOs and many more!  Tokenguard is the first automated rating agency for Ethereum and other blockchains. The technology aggregates the best techniques for ICOs / smart contracts automated verification, allowing investors, VCs and banks to c...

This week we are presenting a very special Fireside Chat as part of Fintech Week London 2021 broadcasted live from Barclays Rise. Joining Lloyd Wahed, we’ll have special guests from PensionBee and Blackrock explaining different strategies to encourage green finance: excluding fossil fuel producers from investments, engage with fossil fuel producers and how to encourage them to change, impact inves...

Speculations, hypes, doges, icos, nfts aside.. what’s next for blockchain in financial services? How can this underlying technology disrupt the banking system?  This week we are presenting a very special panel session as part of Fintech Week London 2021 broadcasted live from Barclays Rise. We’ll have Chris Skinner, author of the Finanser, Marcus Treacher, board director of ClearBank/ ex-Ripple, Ha...