Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United Kingdom based Product operating in the Financial Services space. If you think a Product is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Sharon Anne Kean
Product Lead – International Expansion of Wise
Product, UX, tech and start-ups. Excitable, empathetic, enthusiastic. Love a challenge.
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
Gregory Talon
Senior Product Director of Wise
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
Tessa Pettman
Head of Product Marketing. of Wise
Tessa Pettman is the head of product marketing at TransferWise.
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
James Gibson
Head of Product of Revolut
James Gibson, Head of Product for Revolut for Business oversees the team that is changing the way British and other European businesses manage their day to day business finances. An Oxford graduate with a background in consulting, James Gibson joined Revolut back in 2017. He spent a year in business development in the retail side of Revolut and his second year building the Revolut for Business product from the ground up. Today he oversees multiple product teams, business development and marketing.
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Joshua Fernandes
Senior Product Owner of Revolut
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Si Jia Wen
Product Operations Manager of Revolut
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Brian Carroll
Member & Head of Retail and Consumer Products – Europe of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
Brian Carroll (London) is a Member of KKR. He joined the firm in 1995 and currently heads the Consumer and Retail teams in Europe. He is also a member of the European Investment Committee. Since joining the firm, he has played a significant role in many investments including Laureate Education, Sealy Corporation, Borden, Merit Behavioral Care, Randall’s Food Markets, Rockwood/Dynamit Nobel, Harman International, Wild Flavors, Wincor Nixdorf, Pets at Home, Northgate Information Solutions, SMCP Group, Cognita Schools and Afriflora. He is currently a member of the board of directors of Laureate Education, Pets at Home, Northgate Information Solutions, Cognita, SMCP and Afriflora. Prior to joining KKR, Mr. Carroll was with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette where he worked on a broad range of high yield financing, corporate finance and merchant banking transactions. He has a B.S. and B.A.S. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
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About Kohlberg Kravis Roberts: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is a global alternative asset manager focusing on private equity, fixed income, and capital markets.
Paul Baker
Vice President Product Management, Identity Solutions, Cyber & Inteligence Solutions of Mastercard
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About Mastercard, Mastercard: Mastercard provides payment processing products and solutions, and related consulting services.
Jennyfer Yeung-Williams
Head of Insurance Products, Europe of Mastercard
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About Mastercard: Mastercard provides payment processing products and solutions, and related consulting services.
Swen Werner
Managing Director, Digital Product Development and Innovation of State Street
Swen Werner is currently part of State Street’s Digital Product Development and Innovation team responsible for designing new products, leveraging different emerging technologies, including distributed ledger technologies and engagement with industry partners to design industry-leading service and operating models. He has been working in the financial services industry for over 15 years and has held senior roles in Europe, the USA and Asia with JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Boerse focusing on product management for custody, clearing and collateral management. Mr. Werner has and continues to be actively engaged in regulatory and industry developments affecting the securities services environment. He holds an Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) from Cass Business School in London.
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About State Street: State Street is a leading financial services provider serving some of the world’s most sophisticated institutions.
Pinar Emirdag
SVP, Head of Digital Product Development and Innovation of State Street
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About State Street: State Street is a leading financial services provider serving some of the world’s most sophisticated institutions.
Michele Curtoni
Digital Product Development & Office of Architecture of State Street
Michele Curtoni works as VP in State Street’s Digital Product Development and DLT team. Prior to his current role, he was manager and strategy leader for LSEG Emerging Technologies group. Michele currently focuses on working in the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Digital Assets space, and has been in the space for the past 4 years. In his roles Michele has covered many aspects of the innovation cycle, from working on implementing business applications and proof of concepts with emerging technologies, to start-ups and wider Fintech space engagement. He also worked over four years in the LSEG Group Strategy division, taking a central role in several of the Group’s high profile acquisitions and corporate partnerships as well as other Group strategic initiatives. Michele holds an MSc from the University of Warwick in Economics and International Financial Economics (EIFE).
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About State Street: State Street is a leading financial services provider serving some of the world’s most sophisticated institutions.
George Berkowski
Chief Product Officer of Gocompare.com
George is currently the CPO at GoCompare, and Founder of DeepAR.ai Formerly CPO for HAILO – the international Taxi App (acquired by Daimler) Co-founder and CPO of dating site WooMe.com (acquired by Zoosk.com) Head of Internet Strategy & eCommerce at BT.com VP Marketing and Business Development at MirCorp (facilitated the first 2 space tourist flights with Rosaviakosmos). Has a masters from the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Paris Rocket science @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology. George is the author of the new best-selling book (Little, Brown), ‘How to Build a Billion Dollar App’.
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About DeepAR, Gocompare.com: Gocompare.com is a British financial services comparison website provides comparison details for vehicle, home and pet insurance.
Terry Cordeiro
Head of Product Management – Digital, Transformation of Lloyds Banking Group
A senior professional passionate about Digital, Product Management, Innovation and Design, Terry has recently been voted one of the 50 most innovative and powerful people in European digital financial services. Terry is also co-author for the Fintech Book, the worlds first crowd sourced book on Fintech. Terry has over 15 years Product Management, Solution Design and Proposition Development experience in technology areas such as fixed voice, VoIP, mobile banking/payments architecture and software design.
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About Lloyds Banking Group: Lloyds Banking Group is a major British financial institution formed through the acquisition of HBOS by Lloyds TSB in 2009.
Ben Chisell
Director of Product of OakNorth
Ben Chisell is Product Director at Starling Bank, a modern mobile-only bank built to help customers gain better insight into their financial lives, and give them access to all of their financial products in one place through the Starling Marketplace. Ben wants to build a bank that truly puts the customer first, and solves meaningful problems that can have a positive impact on their lives.
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About OakNorth: OakNorth is the creator of the ON Credit Intelligence Suite – proven cloud software that transforms commercial lending
Andrea Fernandez
Partner, Head of Product Management and Investor Relations, European Credit of Ares Management
Andrea Fernandez is the Partner, Head of Product Management and Investor Relations, European Credit at Ares Management Corporation.
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About Ares Management: Ares Management is a global alternative asset manager focusing on credit, private equity, and real estate.
Antonio Gagliardi
Vice President – Strategy, Product, and Analytics – Merchant Services of American Express
Before founding CompareEuropeGroup, Antonio was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company in their UK Financial Services practice. Prior to this, Antonio worked at Bain & Co and at JP Morgan Chase. Antonio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, with a special distinction for finishing in the top 10%, and graduated summa cum laude from Bocconi University.
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About American Express: American Express is a global financial services company best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses.
Brett Pybus
Managing Director – Head of iShares EMEA Investment and Product Strategy of BlackRock
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About BlackRock: BlackRock is an investment company that offers its services to institutions, intermediaries, foundations, and individual investors.
Bobby Chadha
Head of Product – Payments of Banco Santander
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About Banco Santander, MaxTax: Banco Santander is a retail and commercial bank that offers financial products for individuals.
Nick Turner-Samuels
Chief Product Officer of Ziglu
Product Leader with a proven track-record delivering successful digital services for start-ups and large companies in fintech, mobile & media, such as Ziglu, 11:FS, Mettle, HSBC, Microsoft, Samsung & BBC. MBA from London Business School.
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About Ziglu: Ziglu provides a digital platform that enables customers to exchange fiat currency for cryptocurrency.
Brian Simpson-Adkins
Product Owner Infrastructure as Code & Principle DevOps Engineer of Barclays
Brian Simpson-Adkins is the Product Owner for Infrastructure as Code at Barclays and is responsible for the strategy, architecture and development of tooling covering this space. It’s his ambition to enable application developers to drive the hybrid clouds at Barclays using code based technologies and to teach their application teams how to deploy infrastructure in a consistent and repeatable manner using code. Brian has spent the past 20 years working in Infrastructure and the last 9 years with Virtualisation or Cloud technologies. He’s had a varied career having worked in both the media and service provider industries. For the last 8 years he’s been based at Barclays in the UK.
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About Barclays: Barclays is a global financial services company that provides various financial products and services worldwide.
Chris Johnson
Senior Product Manager, Market Data of HSBC
Chris joined HSBC Securities Services in 2006 and is the Head of Product Management, Market Data Services. Chris was previously at Threadneedle Investments where he was Head of Investment Information Services. Before then he was a Director at UBS. Chris started work in the city with Laurie, Milbank stockbrokers, in their futures and options operations team, continuing with Chase Manhattan for a further ten years, culminating in three years as head of the equity derivatives middle office. He also headed OTC derivative client valuations at Bankers Trust. Chris is a member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment
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About HSBC: HSBC is a banking and financial services organization that offers a comprehensive range of services.
Rachel Robinson
Head of Digital Strategy & Product Development of Nationwide Building Society
Rachel is Head of Digital Strategy and Product Development at Nationwide Building Society, where she shapes Nationwide’s digital vision and roadmap and works with teams to set clear, value orientated goals. Rachel started her career in consultancy at Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, before moving into digital product development. She’s worked with a wide variety of organisations, from start-ups and scale-ups to listed companies in retail, travel and housing/financial services, before joining Nationwide in 2013. Since joining the Building Society she has worked in a variety of leadership roles across digital banking, innovation and product development – and played a lead role in Nationwide’s agile transformation story over the last 18 months.
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About Nationwide Building Society: Nationwide Building Society is a British mutual financial institution and the largest building society in the UK.
Nikita Filippov
Chief Product Officer of ANNA : Absolutely No Nonsense Admin
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About ANNA : Absolutely No Nonsense Admin: Business Banking and Admin service
Chris Beckett
Associate Director of Data Science (Product and Marketing) of Monzo
Chris Beckett is the Associate Director of Data Science (Product and Marketing) at Monzo Bank.
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About Monzo: Monzo is a digital-only bank platform and marketplace that allows customers to access a range of products and services.
Joel Ippoliti
Chief Product Officer of Seedrs
Joel helps companies achieve new growth by focusing their products on opportunities in the market and better addressing the needs of its users. He has experience bringing products to market from concept to launch – end to end – including gathering the evidence to provide the initial direction through to running multidisciplinary teams to deliver.
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About Ippolito International, Seedrs: Seedrs is a UK-based investment and crowdfunding platform.
Omar Haque
SVP, Chief Product Officer, Merchant Services of Nets
Omar Haque is Nets MS’ Chief Product Officer and over 17 years of experience in managing digital and technology-driven transformation at global organizations. He has helped companies exploit and develop market and technology trends. Before joining Nets he has been with e.g. Worldpay, Vestas, Cisco.
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About Nets: Nets is a provider of payments, card, and information services with an ambition.
Steve Farrugia
Product Owner of Pepperstone
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About Pepperstone: Pepperstone is an Australian online retail foreign exchange broker specializing in foreign exchange trading.
Jon Hodges
VP Product – Head of Buy-Side Portfolio Manager of FIS
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About FIS: FIS focuses on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk and compliance, and outsourcing solutions.
Valeria Hodgkinson
Data Landscape Product Owner of MetLife
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About MetLife: MetLife is a provider of insurance, employee benefits, and financial services .
Ciprian Blujdea
Product Manager of Juni
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About Juni: Juni is a fintech company that develops a banking app and platform for e-commerce and online marketing entrepreneurs.
Timur Garifzyanov
Chief Product Officer of tulipshare
Timur Garifzyanov is the Chief Product Officer at Tulipshare.
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About tulipshare: Tulipshare is the first activist investment platform, with a focus on impactful project to make this planet better.
Mike Walters
Chief Product Officer of Form3
Mike joined Form3 from Barclaycard Payment Acceptance (card acquiring) where, as Product Director, he was a member of the Executive Committee and responsible for P&L, product management, strategy development, vendor selection and management, digital transformation and M&A. Prior to this, as Head of UK Corporate Payments for Barclays Corporate Bank, Mike held product management responsibility for all payment, receipting and reporting products and services delivered to Barclays corporate clients – this included defining the Barclays Corporate Bank mobile payments strategy and initiating, building and scaling the multi-award winning ‘Pingit for Corporates’ mobile payment solutions. Earlier in his career he managed client relationship teams responsible globally for the North American Financial Institutions and FTSE 250 sectors. With his significant experience across the payment and client landscape, Mike and his team is responsible for designing, scaling and managing the Solutions delivered by Form3.
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About Form3: Form3 is a cloud native payments-as-a-service platform that designs, builds, and runs the technology that powers the future of payments.
Simon Taylor
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of 11:FS
Simon is Co-Founder and Director of Blockchain at 11:FS. Previously at Barclays, he established the bank as one of the leaders in blockchain thought and action. Simon also serves as an advisor to central banks and governments, in addition to consulting the top 20 banks on blockchain. He’s helped a variety of startups flourish through the Barclays Accelerator.
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About 11:FS: We build digital banks. Digital Banking is Only 1% Finished but we’re there for the 99%.
Alison Bloom-Feshbach
Senior Product Manager of CommonBond
Alison Bloom-Feshbach is a Senior Product Manager at CommondBond.co. She is a former CEO and Co-Founder of Know Your Crew and Consulting Associate at Arc Aspicio. Ms. Bloom-Feshbach graduated from Yale University with a bachelor of arts in Cognitive Science (Decision-making concentration) and received an MBA in Organizational Strategy and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School.
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About CommonBond: CommonBond was founded in 2012 to help relieve the student loan burden, and since then we’ve funded over $4 billion in better loans.
Dan Symons
Head of Product of Collective Benefits
Dan is currently Head of Product at Collective Benefits.
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About Collective Benefits: Insurance and benefits to make independent work, work for everyone.
Karl Knoflach
Chairman, Co-Founder, Head of Marketing and Product of C88 Financial Technologies
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About C88 Financial Technologies: C88 connects banks and insurers in Asia to consumers buying financial products online.
James Carlyle
Chief Information Officer & Head of Production of R3
James is R3’s Chief Information Officer and is focused on defining a candidate architecture and building out a collaborative lab for experimentation. Previously, James was Chief Engineer within Corporate Banking at Barclays, where he designed and delivered the bank’s corporate internet channel, and the bank’s US banking and dollar clearing platforms. Before Barclays, James co-founded two start-ups and holds patents in mobile data search and directory technology. He is a Chartered Engineer and holds a degree in Engineering Science from University College, Durham.
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About R3: R3 is a financial innovation firm dedicated to the design and deployment of DLT to build the new operating system for financial services.
Muneeb Shah
Head Product Commercialisation and Strategy- Payments of R3
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About R3: R3 is a financial innovation firm dedicated to the design and deployment of DLT to build the new operating system for financial services.
Rohit Agarwal
Global Head (EVP), Product, Digital of HSBC Bank
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About HSBC Bank: HSBC Bank provides various banking and financial services worldwide.
Rodolfo Picciau
Director, OMS Product Development and Engineering of FactSet
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About FactSet: FactSet is a financial research company that offers risk analytics tools and real time data feeds for institutional investors.
Duncan Barrigan
Chief Product Officer of GoCardless
Founded in 2011, GoCardless is building a global network of recurring bank-to-bank payments, offering a solution for multiple direct debit schemes in Europe that will soon be launched in Australia. With its simple API and pre-assembled integrations with large software vendors, it enables businesses of all sizes to reduce losses, improve cash flows and save money. Winner in 2016 of the fastest growing FinTech business award at Deloitte Fast50, support 30,000 businesses and bill more than $ 3 billion per year with customers such as Box.com, TripAdvisor, Glovo and Podo. Its headquarters are in London and have as main software partners Zuora, Sage and Billin. Duncan joined the business in 2015 and has been building product management from scratch. Prior to working in technology he was a strategic consultant advising PE / VC investors at Fintech and M & A financial services at Oliver Wyman. He holds a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
Deepak Colluru
Principal Product Manager of GoCardless
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
David Stobs-Stobart
Senior Product Manager of GoCardless
David builds and leads enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and product teams for growth-stage technology companies. He brings a wealth of experience in product management and user experience (UX) within technically complex online environments, in both large and small teams. David specialises in products relating to analytics/ business intelligence (BI) and customer experience (CX) management. Users are increasingly mobile, social and demand a more personalized, human interaction with the brands they use. I’m proud to be working in the enterprise space helping organisations to engage with their customers, make better decisions and improve their workflows; solving complexity with well-designed applications users love. Over the last 10 years, he has taken the lead product role in 4 early-stage companies and built the product team and product management function. During that time, he has launched 7 products covering search, analytics, machine learning, content optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, self service, workflow management, data mining, social media, APIs, customer service and customer experience.
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
Tom Stenhouse
Head of Product, Equities of London Stock Exchange Group
Tom Stenhouse is the Head of Product, Equities at London Stock Exchange Group.
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About London Stock Exchange Group: London Stock Exchange Group is an international market infrastructure that delivers a range of insights to its financial community.
Jose Gomes
Head of Digital Product of Proportunity
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About Proportunity: Proportunity is a financial services organisation made possible by technology.
Richard Bentley
Chief Product and Engineering Officer of Calypso Technology
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About Calypso Technology: Calypso Technology provides an integrated trading, risk and processing platform for financial institutions and corporate treasuries.
Mark Loader
Director of Product Management, Marketing & Partnerships of ITRS Group
Mark joined ITRS in June 2012 as Managing Director Asia and brings more than 20 years of international experience in the field of fintech and data. Mark is responsible for all of ITRS’ product, marketing and partnership strategy covering both Geneos and Insights & Valo. He’s regularly on the road evangelizing our business and platform strategy with customers, partners and colleagues. Prior to joining ITRS, he was Global Head of Quantitative Analytics and Datafeeds at Thomson Reuters with general management responsibility for over US$230 million in annual revenue from more than 1500 clients globally, spanning traditional asset managers, sell-side research, hedge funds and proprietary trading desks.
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About ITRS Group: ITRS Group is the leading provider of risk mitigation solutions to global financial institutions.
Richard Kelly
Director & Head of New Product Development of Foresight Group
Richard Kelly joined Foresight Group in 2014 and currently works as a Director in the London office. He has over 11 years of experience. Richard is responsible for the development and launch of innovative investment products and new business divisions. Prior to joining Foresight Richard worked at Accenture as a Strategy Manager where he focused on merger and acquisition strategy across a variety of industries. He has also worked as an Intern at Oxford Capital Partners, focusing on investment business plan screening and portfolio company performance improvement. Richard holds a BA in Business & Management from Exeter University.
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About Foresight Group: Foresight is an infrastructure and private equity investment manager that manages funds on behalf of institutions and retail clients.
Ollie Maitland
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Capitalise.com
Ollie Maitland is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Capitalise.com. He was the Innovation Practice Director of Inviqa.
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About Capitalise.com: Capitalise uses a little funding magic to identify the best financing options available for your business.
Tam Holmes
Chief Product Officer of 10xbanking
Tam heads product management, client delivery, security, business development and partnerships. He is passionate about delivering platforms that make banking an easy, safe and rewarding experience for all. Tam has close to two decades of experience in digital banking, security and technology. His career has spanned technology consulting at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, co-founding a successful fintech start-up and spending ten years in digital banking at Lloyds Banking Group. He is a recognised expert in digital security, mobile security and fraud prevention and sits on the cyber leadership team of the Business Emergency Resilience Group (BERG), part of the Prince’s Responsible Business Network.
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About 10xbanking: 10xbanking offers a digital banking platform that will transform the way financial services providers operate.
Paul Manze
Head of Product of Funding Xchange
Paul Manze is a Head of Product at Funding Xchange and Founder of Chaordic Limited and Acuherb Academy. He was a Product Manager and Development Manager at Insurance intermediary and Divisional Director of mFormation Technologies. Paul received a bachelor of science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Westminster.
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About Funding Xchange: Funding Xchange is transforming and connecting the SME funding eco-system through digital eligibility and affordability assessment tools.
Andrew Quan
Head of Product of Littlepay
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About Littlepay: littlepay is an Australian fintech start-up focused on transit contactless payments
Rosario Garcia de Zuniga
Product Manager of Wave Mobile Money
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About Wave Mobile Money: Wave Mobile Money provides an app-based financial solution to save, transfer, and borrow money.
Marc Tuckmantel
Head of Product Development of Derivitec
Marc joins us from Goldman Sachs, where he worked as a front office strategist on the equity derivatives desk in London. In his four years at the firm Marc extended tools for quoting and risk management of flow products, implemented pricing models and developed propietary algorithmic indices based on trading strategies for clients of the equity exotics desk. Before he joined Goldman Sachs, Marc worked as a doctoral researcher in CERN, conducting research into elementary particle physics and superstring theory.
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About Derivitec: Derivitec is a cloud based risk analytics applications and software.
Phoebe Hugh
Head of New Products of Direct Line Insurance
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About Direct Line Insurance: Direct Line Group is an organization with a clear mission: to make insurance much easier and better value for customers.
Christopher Lomas
Global Digital Products Leader of Mercer
Christopher is an established senior leader in Digital Product Management, with 14+ years experience in Financial Services + Digital Products + Digital Marketing. Christopher currently works for Mercer (the world’s largest HR Consulting company), where he is the Global Digital Products Leader, focused on developing AI products, and lead’s the MercerX Artificial Intelligence community (with over 800 business leaders and managers). In the past he has held roles with American Express, Goldman Sachs, and Lloyds Banking Group, as well as being the founder of three companies. Christopher is exceptionally well connected in the HealthTech, HRTech, FinTech and AI startup scene, and is a passionate promoter of Start-ups and Digital Business. He is a public speaker and thought leader on Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Product Management and Career Management (see press references/ videos below).
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About Mercer: Mercer US is a human resource consulting service that includes compensation, employee benefits, communications, and investment consulting.
Jared Casey
Associate Product and Market Manager of SWIFT
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About SWIFT: SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence.
Stephen Gilderdale
Chief Product Officer of SWIFT
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About SWIFT: SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence.
Quentin Bortolin
Product and Market Manager of SWIFT
Quentin Bortolin is a Global Product/Market Manager for Standards Products, with a specific focus on SWIFT Translator. Quentin is also responsible for the go-to-market of the Standards Products portfolio. Prior to this role he has worked in consulting focusing on standards definition, standards mapping together with business intelligence solutions and intraday liquidity reporting.
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About SWIFT: SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence.
Andrew Lawson
Chief Product Officer of Zopa
Andrew is responsible for Zopa’s overall product strategy and for how our products perform, including customer acquisition, credit risk management, pricing and managing customers through their product journeys. Andrew has over 17 years’ experience in consumer analytics and lending, and prior to joining Zopa in 2014 was an Associate Partner with Oliver Wyman, the international management consulting firm. He has worked with leading consumer facing business across Europe and North America on driving data enabled customer value growth. Andrew started his career at Capital One in the UK.
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About Zopa: Zopa offers peer-to-peer loans with low rates, flexible terms, and no early repayment fees.
Alex Rohloff
Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer of Laybuy
Alex Rohloff is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Laybuy.
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About Laybuy: Laybuy is a technology-driven payments business that makes desirable and affordable payments.
Hariton Korizis
Co-Founder and Chief Product Architect of ResonanceX
Demonstrated history of innovating in the financial services industry, and running lean global business initiatives. Investment Banking professional expertise and Electrical Engineering academic background. Skilled in Derivatives Trading, Investment Strategies, Structuring Securities and Financial Technology. With an additional focus on Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Significant expertise in tailor-made quantitative trading strategies for hedging or investing – with strong quantitative and analytical skills obtained through a PhD focused in Signal Processing Methods for the Modeling & Prediction of Financial Data from Imperial College London. For the past 15 years, I’ve specialized in sophisticated investment products and services that extract real value from the markets in a scalable manner – and designed & built the tech to do so. First in Academia, and then in top tier Investment Banks where I was also responsible to establish all required business & governance and for selling them to Institutional clients globally. In the past, I have been responsible for managing approx GBP 2bio AUM of algorithmic investments and have built 160+ investable strategies & indices – some very successful and sophisticated.
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About ResonanceX: The Low-Code Fintech Agility Platform
Matthew Thompson
Head of Production Services of Bankable
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About Bankable: Bankable develops white-label payment solutions including e-wallets, remittance services, P2P money transfers and prepaid card programmes.
Abbas Hasan
Head of Product and Strategy, SaaS and Outsourced Business Services of LPL Financial
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About LPL Financial: LPL Financial is the largest independent broker-dealer in the United States.
Javier Colón
Head of Product Development of Darwinex
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About Darwinex: Darwinex allows independent traders around the world to quote their strategies and thus access investor capital.
Alex Ryvkin
Chief Product Officer of Copper
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About Copper: Copper is a cryptocurrency custody firm that provides a secure infrastructure for the institutional digital asset investment community.
Tim Armstrong
Managing Director UK and Product Development of Greensill Capital
Tim Armstrong is a member of Greensill’s European team, focusing on developing partnerships within EMEA. Prior to joining Greensill, Tim worked at KPMG managing a Supply Chain Finance solution for clients which utilised partnerships with leading FinTech companies in combination with KPMG’s suite of advisory services. Prior to that, Tim worked in the corporate finance team in Deloitte, working closely with the UK Government’s Department of Business, and at Morgan Stanley, in their securitisation team.
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About Greensill Capital: Greensill Capital is a provider of structured working capital financing to businesses globally.
Amy Bensted
Head of Hedge Fund Products of Preqin
Amy is responsible for all of Preqin’s hedge fund products and solutions. This involves defining Preqin’s strategic direction in the hedge fund industry, both through innovations to our award winning products as well as through our research and communications strategy in this space.
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About Preqin: Preqin provides financial data and information on the alternative assets market.
John Ward
Lead Product Designer of Adhara
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About Adhara: Real time global liquidity management, FX and international payments on CBDCs and tokenized money for banks and central banks
Jonny Bradshaw
Head of Product of FundApps
Jonny is a boomerang having returned home to FundApps after an extended sabbatical in the North. At FundApps he sits in the middle of it all and helps build the things that deliver value to our clients. An all-round lover of life, Jonny enjoys family time, makes a mean Sazerac, and has a long-term ambition to swim the Channel; an achievement which he optimistically targets for 2020.
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About FundApps: We help investment managers harness the power of community and technology to automate regulatory compliance.
Caleb Sheridan
Co-Founder & Product Lead of Eden Network
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About Eden Network: Eden Network is a priority transaction network that protects Ethereum traders from arbitrary block reordering.
Eli Rosner
Chief Product and Technology Officer of Finastra
Eli Rosner is Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Software Solutions for NCR Corporation. In this role, he is accountable for the company’s strategy, formulation, development and cross-functional delivery of NCR’s software portfolio. Rosner also participates in the NCR Leadership Team led by NCR’s President, CEO and Chairman Bill Nuti. Prior to his role leading NCR’s Software Group, Eli was the CTO and Head of Product Management for NCR’s Retail Solutions Division. Eli led software development teams across all Retail segments. He originally joined NCR as Vice President of Global Software Engineering and Development. He oversaw architecture definition, technology selection, solution development and testing. Eli’s previous positions before joining NCR include: Vice President and Chief Business Delivery Officer for the Americas and as Vice President for Global Technology Strategy at Solera Holdings. Prior to this role Eli was accountable for the Office of Strategy Management (OSM) for the overall product strategy for Solera. Eli held numerous leadership roles in product management, engineering and operation, including CIO and SVP of Product Development and GM of International Operations at Mitchell International Inc. He was also CTO and Vice President of Product Management and Engineering at Autodesk (ADSK) Location Based Services. Rosner is a proven leader with more than 25 years of experience in managing diverse product portfolios and strategies, and in working closely with channel partners to drive software innovation. He has a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and Computer Science from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
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About Finastra: Finastra provides the broadest portfolio of financial services software.
Ryan Philo
Founder & Chief Product Officer of Optomany
Ryan was one of the founding team behind Optomany and brought with him over 20 years of experience in the payments arena spanning all areas of product and platform design, development and testing. Previously Head of Product Innovation at Verifone, following its acquisition of Point International, he led the rollout of the Payments as a Service (PaaS) model across multiple international territories. As CPO, he is responsible for Optomany’s system architecture design and our product and solution strategy.
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About Optomany: Optomany specializes in omnichannel payment processing technology, delivering reliable and secure solutions to the retail sector.
Dickie Smith
Product Manager of Nimbla
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About Nimbla: Nimbla is dedicated to providing small and medium-sized UK businesses with dynamic invoice insurance.
Anthony Mann
Co-Founder & Chief Product of Fronted
Notable achievements: Co-Founder of Fronted Founder of YLD Labs (a ventures arm) Founded Make Us Proud – merged with YLD in 2017, Previously worked at Apple
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About Fronted, Make Us Proud, YLD: Fronted pay your deposit upfront, you pay us back in bite-sized chunks.
Braham Djidjelli
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Hugo Save
Braham Djidjelli is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Hugo Save.
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About Hugo Save: Hugo is a digital account that helps you spend, save and invest, starting with gold.
Oliver Smith
Product Director of Credit Benchmark
Oliver Smith is responsible for managing Product and Content within Credit Benchmark. Before joining Credit Benchmark, Olly was co-head for Markit Securities Finance Europe, also managing product Development. He previously held roles at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters within sales and business development.
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About Credit Benchmark: Credit Benchmark is a financial data analytics company.
David Szabo
Product Manager of Capdesk
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About BrandVee, Capdesk: Capdesk is an equity management platform helping companies manage cap tables, shareholder registers, and employee shares.
Roan Lavery
Chief Product Officer & Head of Design of FreeAgent
Roan Lavery is a Chief Executive Officer at FreeAgent.
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About FreeAgent, FreeAgent: FreeAgent provides online accounting and money management software for small businesses and freelancers.
Andy Sweeney
Head of Fixed Income Products of Aviation and Tech Capital
Andy graduated from Cambridge University with an MA (Hons) in Law. He has over 16 years of experience in debt capital markets, all gained working in major global investment banks. He began his career at Citigroup with a focus on raising short term finance for companies via the commercial paper market. Subsequently he worked in the bond syndication teams at RBC Capital Markets and Mizuho International, advising banks, governments and corporates on issuing bonds across a range of currencies for periods of anything from one year to fifty years and in sizes ranging into the billions of pounds. He enjoys innovation and has been responsible for several innovative bond transactions, including creating a retail bond for a major UK bank and designing structures to effectively manage interest rate risk for borrowers. One of his roles in banking was to work to create liquid secondary markets for securities and he looks forward to bringing that experience to the peer-to-peer market. Andy understands that investment is about creating a fair transaction for both borrowers and investors.
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About Aviation and Tech Capital: Owner of Ablrate.com an asset backed peer lending platform specialising in capital equipment and the world’s first to offer aircraft loans
Phil Norton
Product Manager of Kainos
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About Kainos: Kainos provide digital technology solutions that enable companies to work smarter, faster, better.
Kashaf Bashir
SVP Product & Innovation of medii8
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About medii8, Opt1mize: medii8 bank accounts integrated into telecom stack enabling your business to trade with real time transactions.
Musa Jammeh
Co-Founder and Co-CEO Product development of Route Trading
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About Route Trading: Route Trading is develops software to enhance security and transparency for financial institutions, governments, and police forces.
Caerwyn Prothero
Chief Product Officer & Chief Financial Officer & Founder of iCheque Network Ltd.
The Chief Product Officer of iCheque since 2011, Caerwyn is also an original co-founder. Prior to this Caerwyn spent many years at WorldPay helping develop new products and markets in the payment card acceptance space.
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About iCheque Network Ltd.: iCheque Network Ltd. is a highgrowth online payments company.
Vanessa Richards
Chief Product Officer of NorthRow
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About NorthRow: NorthRow helps businesses to efficiently protect themselves from financial crime, from failures to comply with related legislation.
James Sweetman
Product Manager – Alerts of Refinitiv
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About Refinitiv: Refinitiv is a provider of financial markets data and infrastructure.
William Goodwin
Co-founder & Head of Product of Tumelo
William Goodwin is the Co-Founder and Head of Product at Tumelo.
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About Tumelo: Tumelo is an impact-focused financial technology firm with the mission of giving every investor a voice.
Robert Doherty
Product / Channel Manager of Allied Irish Banks plc
Robert has more than 20 years’ experience in the payments industry. He has seen it grow into the multi-million euro industry it is today. His current role as Head of Product involves the deployment of next generation POS such as Clover™, payment gateway integrations, value added products, authorisation analysis and identification of future product requirements. Robert has previously managed all of AIBMS partner relationships including MSPs, ISOs, and PSPs. Robert represents AIBMS at both Visa and MasterCard’s Irish Members forum. He is also part of the Card payments working Group within the National Payments Plan.
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About Allied Irish Banks plc: Bank
Andy Lee
Founder & Chief Product Officer of Sphonic
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About Sphonic: Sphonic is a Context-Broker that leverages 3rd party vendor data with a workflow engine to enable fraud prevention, AML, KYC
Simon Shorey
Head – Product Management of BiBox
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About BiBox: Bibox offers integrated and orchestrated bank solutions through the BiBox Marketplace
Simon Shorey
Head – Product Management of BiBox
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About BiBox: Bibox offers integrated and orchestrated bank solutions through the BiBox Marketplace
Ian Watt
Chief Product Officer of Tellimer
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About Tellimer: Tellimer is a financial brokerage firm that insights, portfolio management, financial planning and advisory service.
Michael Leary
Head of Products of EMBonds
Michael has over 10 years experience trading Emerging Markets credit both in CEEMEA and LATAM. Before joining EMBonds, Michael was a Director at Deutsche Bank in NY trading CDS and other structured products for Latin America. Prior to that he worked at WestLB, Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank in London. He is a graduate of Nottingham University with a BSc in Mathematics and also has a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP Law School.
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About EMBonds: EMBonds is an electronic platform connecting institutional investors and market makers in the secondary trading of Emerging Markets bonds.
Keith Ballantine
Head of Products & Client Solutions of InvestDen
Keith is a founding Partner of Bishops Rock Capital, a debt and equity fund raising and strategy business for selected clients including entrepreneurial start-ups, privately held funds and corporates across a number of industry sectors. Keith has held many investment banking roles during his 23 year career, including leading the Structured Solutions team at Oxygen Finance, serving as Managing Director and Head of CIS and Eastern European sales at Commerzbank, Managing Director in the Strategic Credit Solutions Group at Dresdner Kleinwort and has held senior roles at UBS and CIBC where he focused on asset securitisation.
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About InvestDen: InvestDen is a revolutionary crowdfunding platform, which enables you to raise money or invest in great opportunities
Xiang Yu
Senior Product Manager of Investment Metrics
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About Investment Metrics: Investment Metrics provides investment analytics and benchmarking software solutions for the global institutional investment community.
Robert Cookson
Product Manager of Stockopedia
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About Stockopedia: Stockopedia is an Oxford-based research network & community site, offering tools for investors to analyse, filter, connect investment ideas.
Tony Vail
Co-Founder. Chief Product & Advice Officer of Wealth Wizards
I’ve had a passion for innovation for many years. I believe financial services sorely needs it, and technology provides a great platform to transform the quality and value of what can be offered to customers. I started my career at Prudential where I qualified as an actuary, but soon found that my desire to shake things up led to me into new ventures. I have been a founder of Egg, Zopa and now Wealth Wizards, as well as being an adviser on strategy and product development to various blue chip businesses along the way.
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About Wealth Wizards: Wealth Wizards is the UK’s first online independent financial adviser and we offer digital regulated financial advice and guidance.
Ramzi Yakob
Chief Product Officer of Upside Saving
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About Upside Saving: Upside is Intelligent Cashback as an API, fuelled by Open Banking.
Nicholas Blewden
Head of Data Products of Lloyd’s
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About Lloyd’s: Lloyd’s provides leadership and insight to anticipate risk, and the knowledge to develop relevant, new, and innovative forms of insurance.
Manish Kumar
Head of Product Management & Delivery of Tyl by NatWest
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About Tyl by NatWest: Tyl by NatWest is payment dealer that collects card bills from the customer.
