The Green Room | Fintech Journeys in Asia

In this episode, I speak with Zach Marks, co-founder and CEO of Jia, a fintech leveraging blockchain for receivables financing for businesses in Kenya and the Philippines. Zach has spent his career working in emerging markets, beginning with teaching English in India after college to development consulting in South Sudan. After building and selling his first tech company, an online jobs marketplac...

In this episode, I speak with Chandrima Das, Co-Founder and CEO of Teleskop, a wealth tech that helps people track their family assets today and plan for their legacies in the future. Chandrima has had an illustrious career in asset management, working at Prudential, ING, and Bank of Singapore in several countries, where she had a front-row seat to the sector’s globalization. In the last 10 years,...

In this episode, I speak with Sharon Paul, Co-founder of Headquarters (HQ.xyz), an on-chain business account. Sharon is a Singaporean entrepreneur and has spent many years advancing the Web3 and payments infrastructure space. She is a founding member of StraitsX, a leading stablecoin issuer and fiat-crypto ramp and now serves on the Singapore Fintech Association's Web3 Subcommittee. Through this w...

In this episode, I speak with Hussain Elius, Founder and CEO of Wind, a fintech that is enabling instant cross-border payments built on blockchain rails. Elius has been a career entrepreneur, starting with building an event management business in university. Once he graduated, Elius took an experimental approach to developing the business model that would eventually become the well known Banglades...

In this episode, I speak with Nuraizah Shamsul Baharin, Founder and Managing Director of MADCash, a fintech that drives financial inclusion through Shariah compliant microfinance and data analytics in Malaysia. Nuraizah, who goes by Aizah, started her career as an engineer, working for companies like Nokia and Motorola in the 1990s and 2000s. Aizah founded MADCash in 2020 with a goal to improve fi...

In this episode, I speak with Rachel Freeman, Chief Growth Officer of Tyme, a neobank that began operations in South Africa and has recently been making waves in the Philippines as GoTyme. Rachel has lived in every corner of the world and has been a pioneer of inclusive financial services. She speaks fluent Russian and spent her early career in Russia building a microleasing business. She then spe...

In this episode, I speak with Maria Hoyos, co-founder and CEO of GoNSave, a fintech focused on income smoothing for gig workers in Southeast Asia. Maria started her career in microfinance in Latin America. She brought her experience to Asia when she pursued her Master’ of Science in Innovation at Singapore Management University. We talked about the unique needs of gig workers when it comes to inco...

In this episode, I speak with Ritwik Ghosh, co-founder of Seedflex, a brand new embedded SME lending fintech. Ritwik started his career in banking but quickly moved into consulting at Oliver Wyman, where he focused on retail and SME financial services across South and Southeast Asia. For the last 5 years, Ritwik served as the Regional Head of Lending at Grab, where he drove the growth of embedded...

Happy new year everyone, and welcome back to the Green Room! In this podcast, we go behind the scenes with fintech entrepreneurs and thought leaders in Asia about their careers, impact, and industry insights. I'm your host, Amrita Vir. This is now season 5 of the Green Room. This season we’re covering some fintech basics - income smoothing, SME lending, and digital banking. We’ll also dabble in cr...

In this episode, I speak with Malini Kannan, CEO Office of Thunes, a global B2B cross-border payments infrastructure company. Malini grew up in India and started her career in Singapore, working in research and strategy across a diverse set of sectors. After her MBA from INSEAD, Malini focused more directly on the fintech space, working across the industry and landing at TransferTo, which incubate...

In this episode, I speak with with Aditi Sholapurkar, Co-Founder of SALT, a savings and investment fintech in India that puts women at the center of its product and strategy. Aditi grew up in India and began her career in banking and has spent time working at some of the most well known fintechs in India and Singapore, including Paytm and Nium. She came to learn that only 5% of customers of Indian...

In this episode, I speak with The Noe San, Founder and CEO of Modus Operandi, or MO, a digital financial solutions provider in Myanmar, offering services like wallet transfers, bill pay, earned wage access, cash withdrawal, and more. The Noe grew up in Myanmar and Australia and started her career in law. She moved back to Myanmar in 2020 and got involved in the finance sector through SHWE Bank. Sh...

In this episode, I speak with Vikram Kotibhaskar, co-founder and CEO of Credlinq. AI , which provides embedded finance products to digital e-commerce players using alternative data. Vikram was born and raised in India, completed his Master’s in the US, and then spent many years working across diverse banking roles in Asia. Vikram made the jump to fintech founder with Credilinq. AI in January 2021....

In this episode, I speak with Maha Shahzad, Founder and CEO of BusCaro, a mobility startup in Pakistan that is changing the way that commuters travel. Maha grew up between the US and Pakistan and has worked at many well-known startups in Pakistan inluding FoodPanda, Careem, and Swvl. Maha has seen first-hand the financial, accessibility, and security challenges faced by commuters, particularly wom...

In this episode, I speak with fintech pioneer, Diego Rojas. He has been at the cutting edge of fintech across the globe.  Diego is from Argentina and started coding when he was 8 years old. He joined LendingClub in its very early days in 2011 and then moved to DianRong, another pioneer in fintech in China. He founded a fintech consulting firm called LEAP FINTECH based in Singapore in 2017 before f...

In this episode, I speak with Rebecca Kersch, Founder and CEO of TANGapp, a remittance and payments company that helps overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the US send money to the Philippines. Rebecca grew up in the US and the Netherlands, spent many summers visiting her family in the Philippines, and has studied and lived all over the world. Rebecca started her career in management consulting - t...

Welcome back to season 4 to the Green Room, a podcast where we go behind the scenes with fintech entrepreneurs and thought leaders in Asia about their careers, impact, and industry insights. I'm your host, Amrita Vir. I’m excited to be back sharing my fintech conversations with you. This season, we’ll go back to some fintech basics like payments, lending, and insurance. In the current macro enviro...

In the last episode of Sesason 3 of The Green Room, I speak with Sherry Jiang, Co-founder and CEO of Bluejay, a web3 startup that uses a decentralized stablecoin protocol to issue stablecoins pegged to non-US currencies. Sherry is from California, spent her early career in big tech and social impact, and moved to Singapore in 2018 with Google. She spent time working on Google Pay in India and had...

In this episode, I speak with Ankur Joshi, founder and CEO of Nuclei, a B2B SaaS fintech that helps banks deliver consumer-centric experiences to their customers. Ankur grew up in India, is an IIT grad, and has been a serial entrepreneur for more than 10 years. He’s worked in startups covering everything from e-commerce to quick serve restaurants to app aggregation - and he has used his lessons ac...

In this episode, I speak with Ananya Sinha, the founder of Brown Baddies, an NFT project focused on elevating South Asian women. Ananya was born in New Zealand, grew up in Australia, and is now telling the stories of South Asian women all over the world via NFTs. Ananya is relatively new to web3, but has been an entrepreneur since her uni days at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Ananya...

In this episode, I speak with Kunal Goel, co-founder of PowerCred, which provides alternative data APIs for the MSME market, giving third party lenders real-time access to MSME business data to improve underwriting. Alternative data has been common in consumer credit in emerging markets for years, but the ability to access SME and microSME data from e-commerce, bank, and even utility sources is qu...

In this episode, I speak with Lan Doan, CEO of TAPTAP, which provides loyalty and rewards programs to consumers in Vietnam. Lan grew up in Hanoi and then studied and worked in the US, including getting her MBA from Harvard Business School. Seeing the economic potential of Vietnam after graduation, Lan decided to come back to Vietnam to actually be a part of that growth. After a few years in manage...

In this episode, I speak with Aaron Collett, Senior Credit Manager at Goldfinch, a decentralized credit protocol that connects investors and fintechs in emerging markets to provide stablecoin based credit. Aaron grew up in Indonesia but has worked all over the world, including Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and New York, on various areas of structured financing. Aaron led Asia Origination at Lendab...

In this episode, I speak with Windy Natriavi, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of AwanTunai, which provides supply chain and financial services to micro-merchants in Indonesia. Windy is also the founder of WomenWorks, a “connectivity” marketplace that supports women’s network-building in Indonesia. Windy was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 for Finance and Venture Capital in Asia in 2019 and spent h...

In this episode, I speak with Luis Buenaventura, Philippines country manager for Yield Guild Games, or YGG, which is a play-to-earn gaming guild, giving metaverse players opportunities to earn in blockchain-based currency. Luis has also been a pioneer of web3 in the Philippines. He has founded several businesses, including syndeo media, Infinite.ly , Rebit.ph , and most recently, the BloomX crypto...