Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

This week, Luno’s UK Country Manager Sam Kopelman joins Ollie Brown, our Blockchain Associate Director for an enlightening chat about crypto, entrepreneurship, career progression and so much more! After graduating UCL, Sam joined Rocket Internet, building their operations in Minsk from employee zero to later become a Regional Head in Eurasia. Since then he worked in Berlin, and Paris helping other...

Mojo Mortgages CEO and co-founder Richard Hayes tells Lloyd Wahed how he went from a studying music to founding a leading UK online mortgage broker, that disrupts the sector through its hybrid of smart tech and human mortgage experts. After their Series A funding of £7.6 million, mojo has excelled, recently being the finalist at the British Bank Awards 2021. With their acquisition by RVU (the owne...

Chris Eastwood, co-founder and co-CEO at Penfold , sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his digital-based pension platform for self-employed workers and SME’s.  After entering the industry as a consultant with the Big Four, Chris leads now a UK-based fintech company that reached in 18 months 25,000 users with £25m of assets under management. The company is on a mission to give people more visibi...

This week, Lord Holmes, MBE joins Lloyd in this special episode, within the Fintech Week London 2021, for an enlightening chat about fintech, financial inclusion, crypto and so much more! Lord Holmes is the Vice-Chair of the Parliamentary Groups on Fintech, AI, Blockchain and 4IR. He is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology and has co-authored Lords Select Commi...

This week, Kraken’s Managing Director Jakub Zakrzewski joins Lloyd for an enlightening chat about crypto, fintech, angel investment, career progression and so much more! A Forbes 30 under 30 superstar, with experience at companies like Rocket Internet and Revolut, Jakub offers incredible insight into both blockchain and fintech. Kraken is one of the world's largest and oldest cryptocurrency exchan...

Nick Mills, CircleCI GM EMEA, joins Lloyd to discuss the future of tech and software engineering. The company, which is a software delivery platform automating development workflows and IT operations, has just reached a $1.7 billion valuation, after the recent $100 million Series F. And Nick has a unique perspective on the subject. Since 2008, he joined the tech giants like Microsoft or Facebook (...

Mark Mullen (CEO anad co-founder of Atom Bank) joins Lloyd to discuss the state of UK fintech, mortgage and SME lending and what it takes to disrupt UK banking. And he should know. Throughout his 30 years long career, Mark built his banking experience in a major incumbent bank - HSBC, and later resigned from the CEO position of first direct - one of the earliest adopters of digital UK banking - to...

We’ve got startup lending on the brain this week as serial VC Andrew D’Souza sits down with Lloyd to talk working capital, angel mentorship and so much more. As Founder and CEO of Clearco, Andrew made his name raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and is an adviser and investor to companies such as WealthSimple, Properly, and Tulip Retail. Since graduating engineering and work...

Shachar Bialick (Founder and CEO of Curve) joins Lloyd to discuss how Curve helps its users consolidate multiple cards, and even allowing them to switch pre-COVID-19 purchases back onto a different card in 2020, and what it takes to build one of the UK’s fastest-growing FinTech firms. And he should know. With his background in computer science and special forces in the military, Shachar has co-fou...

Rob Straathof (CEO, Liberis) sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his company offers pre-approved revenue-based SME financing. After entering the industry as an investment banker, Rob developed his expertise in small-business lending at such companies as Wonga, Everline (UK’s first digital SME lender) and Newable BusinessFinance (responsible finance provider backed by the British Business Bank)....

The future of finance is here as Airwallex’ Jed Rose sits down with Lloyd to discuss how he plans to expand the UK operations of this $2.6B valued fintech unicorn. After starting his career in product at Microsoft in the 2000s, Jed moved into finance leading Paymentsense, and into the venture capital sphere with Antler. Since 2020, he joined Airwallex as EMEA GM with huge ambitions to grow the com...

Jacqueline Dewey (CEO, Smart Money People, British Bank Awards) sits down with Lloyd to talk about how her company is helping to build trust and transparency in financial services. Run by Smart Money People, but fully voted for by customers, the British Bank Awards have been named by many as 'the Oscars of the banking world”. After entering the industry with Prudential, Julie developed her experti...

Dave Birch is an internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money. He joins Stefan Ciecierski from Mana Search for a far-reaching conversation that covers the future of money, the coming era of digital currency, digital identity, shared ledgers and blockchain. Dave is an ideal guest to comment on it all. He is named one of WIRED magazine’s global top 15 favourite sou...

Finimize is building the world's largest and most engaged finance community, with over one million subscribers across their app. Max Rofagha, its co-founder and CEO sits down with Stefan Ciecierski to outline how they help casual investors become smarter investors through bitesize content and engaged community. In this chat, Max tells us why neo-brokers democratising access to the stock market has...

Michael Brown (Senior Market Analyst, Caxton FX) joins Lloyd for a special Post-Easter episode tackling the latest economic developments in the UK. Since joining Caxton FX in 2016, Michael has shown an impressive knack for predicting developments in the foreign exchange markets. In this episode, he shares the economic outlook after Brexit and vaccination programmes and tells us how the equity mark...

Sammy Rubin (Founder and CEO of YuLife) sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his company brings together life insurance, wellbeing & rewards in one simple app. After entering the industry with his Computer Science degree from Imperial College London, he co-founded Policy Portfolio with his father from their family’s dining room table and became the youngest Director of a publicly listed company...

The future of money is here as Dawn Capital General Partner Josh Bell sits down with Lloyd to discuss how he finds tomorrow’s behemoths, leading the fund’s Fintech investments. Josh graduated Oxford University in Mathematics, was subsequently a Research Fellow at Harvard University in Economics and Game Theory before his MPhil in Statistics at Cambridge University. After starting his career with s...

James Herbert is the founder and CEOof Hastee - an award-winning earnings on demand technology, offered as a workplace benefit that enables workers to take a portion of their earned pay, on demand, increasing choice and financial flexibility. According to Hastee’s 2020 Workplace Wellbeing Study, nearly half (41%) of workers are now relying on at least one new loan, credit card or overdraft in orde...

Betsy Cohen is the Chairman of FinTech Masala, a sponsor of numerous Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) also known as blank-check companies - one of the hottest trends on Wall Street. Collectively these SPAC investment vehicles have raised more than $1.5 billion.  After serving as Law Clerk to the Honorable John Biggs, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, she...

Why 90% of all startups fail? This week, Harvard Professor Tom Eisenmann joins Mimi Nguyen to discuss his new book - The Fail-Safe Startup. Focusing his research and his MBA class at Harvard University on the mistakes and missteps of entrepreneurs, for the first time, he reveals his findings, and - most importantly - how you can avoid them. During their conversation, Tom tells Mimi about the poten...

Ben Pollard, co-founder and CEO at Cushon, sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his company became the world’s first net zero pension fintech. After entering the industry as an actuarial consultant, Ben leads now a UK-based fintech company offering workplace ISAs with 87,000 customers and £300m of assets under management. The company is on a mission to bring innovation to workplace savings, laun...

This week, Mana Labs co-founder Mimi Nguyen speaks with Lukasz Marczyk from Accenture's Warsaw office.  As an innovation leader and part of Accenture's leadership team in Poland, Lukasz discusses his experience within innovation management and his journey towards becoming Managing Director and Partner at Accenture.  This episode also does a deep dive into the rise of insurtech and the current inno...

This week, Lloyd delves into entrepreneurship and mental health as he welcomes Talis Capital's Matus Maar. As Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Talis, Matus has overseen early-stage investments in such FinTech giants as Onfido, iwoca, PriceFX and many more. Talis is also a leader in mental health amongst VCs. Recently, the firm announced a new initiative that offers mental health support to found...

Mana Labs Co-Founder Mimi Nguyen is in the host's seat this week as she discusses product innovation with University College London's Vaughn Tan. And Vaughn has a unique perspective on the subject. In 2005, he joined Google as a Product Marketing Manager and later worked on projects such as AdWords and Google Maps. Since then, he's become a leading voice on innovation in the culinary sector, advis...

Eterna Capital Partner Andrea Bonaceto joins Lloyd to talk about blockchain investing. Since launching in 2018, Eterna has provided seed and early-stage funding to blockchain innovators like Algorand, Borderless Capital, DFINITY and more. Forbes has named it one of the top three boundary pushing blockchain investing firms, and Andrea has been named to the publication’s Top 30 Under 30 list. In the...