Beyond Fintech: Recent Episodes
Beyond Fintech Hosting Team
Beyond Fintech is a series of interviews with fintech's leading experts with a specific focus on embedded finance and the future of financial services.
Today, Sophie speaks to Quentin Vigneau, Head of Payments at Swile. Quentin has vast experience working in fintech. He’s spent time working in engineering and product roles at giants Worldline and Checkout.com and also founded his own payments startup.
Most recently Quentin joined the team at Swile where he heads up payments for the Series C funded scale up. Swile uses technology and UX to improve employee benefits experience. Launched in 2018 (originally under the name Lunchr) - their goal was to reinvent lunch breaks with colleagues and employee engagement in general. Now, 3 years on, the platform is used by 400,000 employees at some of the world biggest brands.
But what we're interested in hearing about is how Swile have also been embedding a financial proposition within the employee benefits space!
At Money20/20 Sophie caught up with Roisin Levine, Head of UK and European Partnerships at Wise. Roisin has been working within the tech and fintech space for the past 11 years. Before recently taking her new role at Wise, she held senior positions at well known fintech companies Flux and Funding Options.
Roisin is a decorated fintech star, being recognised countless times within the Women in Fintech Powerlist as well as being nominated as Young Leader of the Year and the Women in Credit Award’s Transformation of the Year award.
Wise is one of the UK’s golden fintechs and a North Star business for many startups - recently completing a direct listing on the London Stock Exchange. Wise supports consumers and businesses of all sizes to move money cross-border.
At Money20/20 we spoke with Carmela Gómez Castelao, Head of Open Banking at BBVA.
Carmela has spent more than 20 years working in financial services and Fintech, including 17 at BBVA - where she has held every role from Head of Global Treasury, to COO of New Digital Business - before finding herself leading BBVA’s Global Open Banking programme.
BBVA has earned a reputation for being one of Europe’s most digitally advanced banks. Carmela has a key role in that effort - leading the company’s foray into Open Banking and playing a pivotal role in their collaboration with startups.
That makes Carmela the perfect person to join us at Beyond Fintech to share her career, her background, but also to deep dive into collaboration and answer that age-old question: How should established banks and startups work together?
Sophie speaks with Yasamin Karimi, Head of Product at Codat, during this year's Money20/20. Yasamin has a wealth of experience across the fintech sector, previously working with Vocalink (a MasterCard company) and Starling Bank before taking her current position at Codat in 2019.
Codat enables easy and real-time data connectivity between businesses and their financial software. With over 100+ clients around the world, including industry titans such Zettle, Experian and Atom Bank to name a few, their platform is supporting the growth of SMEs around the world. Giving them better and faster access to their business data.
Having recently completed a $40m investment in July, we hear what's next for Codat from Yasamin.
At this year's Money20/20, Sophie caught up with David Birch.
David has a CV that’s too long to go through. He’s an author, consultant, commentator and non-executive director. He’s a member of the Governing Council of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation and Honorary President of the European e-ID Association.
David’s also been named one of the three most influential people in London Fintech and has one of the top 10 Twitter accounts followed by innovators.
And last year, David published his newest book - The Currency Cold War - which explores the newly emerging world of digital currencies, and the world they will create.
Sophie and David spoke on everything from digital identity to the future of currency. Let’s hear what he has got to say!
Beyond Fintech is coming to you from Money20/20, so it's only fitting we speak with Sophie's very good friend Scarlett Sieber, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Money 20/20.
Scarlett has been championing the tech industry throughout her whole career. Alongside her role with the world’s best known fintech event, she is the host of Tech Tuesdays, a Forbes contributor, The Huffington Post contributor, The Financial Brand contributor, Senior Advisor to NASA, mentor, board member - the list goes on.
Money 20/20 is the industry’s marquee event so we couldn't think of anyone better to be leading its strategy and growth and to create ongoing value for the people and businesses that operate within the fintech ecosystem.
Today Sophie is joined by Amos Kater, Head of Products at Currence, direct to you from Money20/20 in Amsterdam!
Currence was born from a partnership between eight Dutch banks back in 2005 to coordinate payment systems in the country. Since then Currence has evolved into one of the most interesting innovators in the payments sector.
Amos has had an incredible career across payments, Fintech and ecommerce, as well as working for Dutch telecommunications company KPN. So we’re extremely excited to have him join us on Beyond Fintech!
At Money20/20 this week, Sophie speaks to Eimear O’Connor, Chief Operating Officer at Form3.
Eimear has had a fantastic career working at some of the world’s largest banking and payment businesses including Visa, Barclays and most recently Form3.
Form3, as recently as last week, announced their huge funding round of $160m led by Goldman Sachs. As part of the announcement they shared that their market share of all Faster Payments has reached double digit and their team has now set their sights on the US market.
Today we speak to Eimear - touching on her career to date, her view on the world of fintech, her role at Form3 and plans for the future.
At Money20/20, Sophie sat down with Billie Simmons, Co-founder and COO at Daylight.
Billie is a serial entrepreneur, and software engineer who’s been working across the tech industry for the past 15 years. In February of last year, Billie co-founded Daylight – a new, digital only banking platform specially designed for the LGBT+ community.
Daylight’s card, app and digital banking platform is the first and only digital banking platform in the US specially designed for and by the LGBT community.
Today Sophie speaks to Matthias Kröner, Founder and MD at Tradelite Solutions.
Matthias has spent the last 25+ years working within financial services. Having founded two banks, Matthias has some amazing experience working in corporate finance.
Matthias’ most recent venture, Tradelite Solutions, is a new fintech company on the verge of launching a pioneering, easy- to- use and quick- to- launch game SaaS platform as a powerful toolkit for financial services providers.
Today we’ll learn more about the Tradelite vision, their approach to embedded finance and Matthias’ view on the future of financial services as a whole.
In this episode Sophie speaks with Dr Leda Glyptis, Chief Client Officer at 10x.
Leda has some incredible experience working across banking and fintech, describing herself as a recovering banker, lapsed academic and a long-term resident of the banking ecosystem.
In this episode Leda explains how legacy banking technology is becoming a bigger challenger for the incumbents and discusses how she is helping upgrade the world’s banking infrastructure with 10x platform.
In this episode Sophie is joined by Simon Torrance, CEO at Embedded Finance and Super App Strategies. Simon helps organisations grow more dynamically and sustainably by adopting digital business models.
His experience spans over 25 years and over this time he has built a strong network of world-class partners, subject matter experts and specialist execution organisations to develop and implement platform based growth strategies, breakthrough innovation programmes and new digital ventures.
Alongside his day to day work, Simon is a regular keynote speaker and has spoken at events worldwide such as MIT Platform Strategies Summit, ITU Leaderships Summit, Gitex and the Broadband World Forum.
In this episode Sophie is joined by Florian Graillot, Founding Partner at AstoryaVC and an industry thought leader within the InsurTech space.
Astorya.vc is a European early-stage insurance fund which launched in 2018.
Florian has been working in the investment space for the past 15 years including positions at Newfund - a tech VC based in Paris and AXA Ventures-a VC fund investing in European insurance startups, and now astoryaVC.
Florian is an engineering graduate from Telecom ParisTech and business school graduate from HEC Paris and for those that don’t yet follow him across Linkedin and Twitter, Florian regularly writes and tweets about InsurTech, AI and startups.