Josh Bottomley

Katryna Dow

George Charalambous

George Charalambous was appointed Head of Mobile Banking with effect from 1st January 2014 overseeing all aspects of Mobile Banking services and digital pipeline across HSBC’s UK retail businesses, HSBC, first direct and M&S Bank. George’s career at HSBC spans over 18 years during which he has completed a diverse number of roles across the Branch Network, Contact Centres and Head Office functions including Credit Risk, Change Delivery and Customer Value Management. He has been responsible for a number of key step change programmes for the organisation including the rollout of Positive Data Sharing, Contactless Debit cards and the Paym mobile payments service. More recently, he is leading the evaluation of the innovative Zapp mobile payments solution, and a number of other Mobile Payment/Digital wallet solutions for the UK bank

See George’s LinkedIn profile–>

Julia Holzgreve

Julia leads innovation scouting, strategic partnerships and ecosystem development at Keen Innovation, the independent fintech innovation lab of Bank Cler and Basel Cantonal Bank in Switzerland. In addition, Julia is a mentor in the F10 Fintech Incubator & Accelerator in Zurich and actively involved in several local networks and associations. Before shifting her focus to banking innovation, she held several roles in marketing and customer strategy at UBS, eBay, Accenture and Hyatt. Julia holds a BSc in Hospitality Management and an Executive MBA from London Business School.

Leon Muis

Leon is Chief Business Officer of Yolt: a smart money platform built to harness the power of open banking. Yolt, which is owned by ING, was born in 2016 and is currently available in open Beta in the UK. Having worked as consultant for Retail Banks worldwide, Leon joined ING in 2011 before moving to Yolt in April 2017.

Leon is currently leading Yolt Technology Services, Yolt’s service which offers companies across Europe access to accounts via open banking APIs, to help accelerate their business. This includes all bank data connections that Yolt makes, which makes Leon Yolt’s Open Banking and PSD2 expert. As a driven Fintech and Retail banking professional, he is committed to bringing a frictionless banking experience to consumers.

Leon has vast international experience both professionally and personally, and currently resides near Utrecht with his wife and 3 young children. When he’s not sharing his Open Banking expertise, Leon enjoys sports, and is himself an active cyclist and runner.

Sirpa Nordlund

Sirpa Nordlund is Senior Vice President in Issuing and eSecurity services and Country Director for Finland at Nets with focus on delivering new exponential payment services to banks and financial institutions. Nets connects banks, businesses and merchants with solutions making tomorrow a little easier for their customers.

Sirpa is an experienced leader at financial and hi-tech industry. She has held several management positions in sales, business development and finance at Nokia and later at Giesecke & Devrient. Sirpa came to Nets in 2017 from the position of Executive Director of Mobey Forum, a global industry organization empowering banks and financial institutions to lead in mobile money, which she held since 2010.

For 15 years, Sirpa has been internationally recognized commentator in digital transformation, both in fields of payments and leadership. She has had speaking engagements at global thought leader events, such as Mobile World Congress, European Payment Summit and Retail Banking Europe. Sirpa holds a Master of Science degree in Economics from the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, majoring in finance. She also has advanced studies in performing arts at Sibelius Academy (University of Arts), as well as Political Science at Helsinki University.

See Sirpa’s LinkedIn profile–>

Maurizio Poletto

After studying branding and graphic design in Italy Maurizio Poletto moved to Vienna in 1996 to work on new media projects for several large European brands and cultural institutions. In 2003 he founded Collettiva Design to focus on branding and innovation strategy. In September 2012 he was appointed as creative manager and managing director of BeeOne GmbH, a strategic innovation unit for Erste Group, one of the largest central European financial institutions. He has a wife, two kids and a bike.

See Maurizio’s LinkedIn profile–>

Hetal Popat

Sarah Häger

Sarah Häger is heading the Open Banking Community team who’s responsibility is to give the developers a good experience while realizing their ambitions on the Open banking platform. She is also Product Manager for an Agile release train and has the responsibility for Community and co-creation. She has worked in several countries (Europe-wide) and along the value chain, with the main mission to provide value for the customers. She is passioned about innovation, technology and to create commercial opportunities out of regulation.

Speaker at conferences such as: EFMA, Moneylive, EBA day, Finextra, Mobey Forum etc.

See Sarah’s LinkedIn profile–>

John James

John is head of Digital Product for first direct.  An experienced digital leader, John has product managed and delivered award winning innovative services ranging from new product journeys through to partnerships with fintechs delivering new open banking based apps.

John is currently responsible for first direct’s digital services. He has extensive experience working in digital banking in a number of banks for the last 15 years. Experienced in transformation delivery using Agile & traditional project management approaches.   John lives in Leeds with his family and occasionally manages to cycle to work.

first direct launched in 1989 to “pioneer amazing service” and has been open 24×7, every day since.  Consistently award winning for customer service, currently #1 rated in the UK for customer service. first direct is a pioneer of easy banking that has never had a single branch. first direct is part of the HSBC Group.

Nick Kerigan

Nick was Managing Director for Future Payments in Barclays in London, leading a team of strategists, designers and developers responsible for innovation across the Cards and Payments businesses, creating next-gen payments experiences and partnering with FinTechs.

He has strong expertise in digital payments, growth strategies and product development, based on a deep understanding of customer and merchant trends, and grounded in more than 20 years’ experience in developed and emerging markets.

In his most recent role, he drove cultural change around innovation, alongside creating a strong brand profile as a top 100 financial sector influencer on social media.
Hence he is optimally placed to drive new growth in established and scaling financial services businesses.

Nick is an established conference speaker at industry events: select engagements include keynote at Finovate, FinTech Connect, Fintech World Forum, The Cards and Payments Summit, Lafferty International Cards and Payments Conference and the Future of Payments Conference.

Nick was with Barclaycard since 2011 and with Barclays since 2006, in various digital, market intelligence and strategy roles including Head of Strategy for Retail and Business Banking.

Prior to that, Nick was Principal Banker in private equity at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), where his role included investing in financial institutions in CEE.

Veronica Lange

Andreas Down

Andreas Down, was working as IT manager and innovative IT strategist of the Fidor AG (www.fidor.de / www.fidor.com) since the end of 2009. He was the head of the entire data center operations, application development and internal IT group landscape with the founding of FidorTecs AG in 2013.

He was also responsible in the new Fidor AG as a board member and CIO for the complete IT Operations, Security & Support of the Fidor Group.

Straight from the beginning, Fidor developed numerous innovative concepts. An example of this, is the first user-driven interest rate of the FidorPay account, which is directly related to the number of Likes on Facebook. The latest coup is the SAS solution “O2 Banking”, which Fidor developed for Telefonica subsidiary O2.

Andreas Down was working for various Banks and Financial Service Companies as a subproject or project leader between 1994 and 2009. Since 1989 he is mainly working in IT banking environments. From June 2017 until February 2018, he was acting in the interim CIO role for a Bank in Bulgaria and Romania. From April 2018 till September 2019 project work for Daimler Mobility Services, building the Mpay Payment Gateway System as a Security Architect and Consultant. Since October 2019 acting as VP Business Development and Head of Innovation for the Norwegian Security Software manufacturer Promon.

He is a member of the BDS, Germany and other interest groups with a focus on IT innovation, security and social IT integration.

Edward Maslaveckas

Edward Maslaveckas is the Co-founder and CEO of Bud. Ex-Salesforce turned FinTech professional, with a background in econometrics. Edward has been building Bud’s award winning platform over the past four years. He is excited to be building an intelligent middle layer in financial services.

Bud is the Open Banking Platform, putting customers at the centre of the financial world. Open banking creates many opportunities for both customers and institutions to thrive; Bud is creating new experiences through fostering collaboration within its platform and partner ecosystem. Bud will bring a truly one to one relationship back into digital banking.

Built on the pillars of financial inclusion and literacy Bud believes being smart with your money should be effortless.  Winner of the 2017 British Bank Award for Innovation of the year, Bud mission is to bring the benefits of open banking to an international audience.

Joakim Sjöblom

Joakim, CEO of Minna Technologies has founded three companies over the last 10 years and spent the latest 6 years within Fintech. As a founder of Minna Technologies, Joakim conducted partnerships with leading retail banks and navigated 3rd party FinTech integrations. Minna enables new customer value to retail banks and their digital banking experience.

The core products are related to subscription management, enabling the end-user of the bank to save time and save money, straight from the mobile bank. The platform has performed more than 150 000 successful cancellations and improvements of subscriptions, equals savings of more than 30.000.000 Euro.
Enabled by Open Banking and designed to be integrated inside retail banks, Minna is currently working on 7 different markets with partners such as Swedbank, Danske Bank, OP Bank and ING.

See Joakim’s LinkedIn profile–>

Konstantin Demblin

Konstantin has studied digital media art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He started his career as a developer in the gaming industry. Later he worked for several years in the research and development lab of bwin.com. In 2012 he joined BeeOne GmbH, a strategic innovation unit for ErsteGroup, as a designer and helped growing the design team. He currently leads the design system team at George-Labs. Konstantin moves pixels, writes optimizable code and sits in meetings – probably in reverse order.

Douglas Hartung

Douglas Hartung currently serves as Diebold Nixdorf’s senior director, business development & alliances. In this role, he is responsible for identifying, leading and evangelizing new business and product ventures to expand the organization’s software portfolio across the Banking and Retail sectors.

An experienced professional focused at the intersection of payments, mobile and financial services, Douglas has managed innovation and new product development programs in numerous large organizations. Prior to joining Diebold Nixdorf in 2014, Douglas was responsible for mobile payment services and emerging products with PULSE, a leading electronic funds transfer network. He also worked with H&R Block, where he led the company’s strategy to differentiate its tax business with new products and services. In addition, Douglas held various business strategy and product development roles with Sprint Communication Corporation.

Douglas is a native Californian and currently resides in Houston, Texas. He received a master’s degree in business administration from the University of California at Irvine, and bachelor’s degrees in both business economics and philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Paul Butterworth

Paul is an experienced payment and security professional, having spent almost 30 years in the card, payments and IT security industries. Paul started his career as a software engineer developing embedded payment applications for card payment terminals. His strong technical background and understanding of the card and mobile payment and IT security industry, along with his ability to communicate across the spectrum, has enabled him to help deliver world-leading solutions to market. For the past fifteen years, Paul has focussed on IT security and mobile wallets, delivering product marketing, product management and strategic marketing for several organisations pushing technology boundaries including Trustonic, ViVOtech and nCipher.

Jordi Guaus

Jordi Guaus is a Telecom Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and also holds a degree in Business Administration from the Open University of Catalonia.

He joined CaixaBank in the year 2000, having worked at Vodafone for 5 years as the in-charge of Corporate Market Services Development, prior to that. At CaixaBank, a leading retail bank in Spain, Jordi has worked in Mobile Financial Services, developing services including the first Mobile Internet Banking.

While working as the Head of Mobile Payments, Jordi leaded the NFC & Remote Payments related initiative at CaixaBank. Where, he was focus on Mobile Payments in collaboration with the Cards Unit of CaixaBank. Moreover, he was the Project Manager of the mobile NFC pilot in Sitges, Spain (“Mobile Shopping Sitges 2010”), the first NFC payment trial in Spain. Later, he worked in the deployment of CaixaBank’s mobile payment services.

In 2014 Jordi joined the CaixaBank’s Marketing Department as a Digital Marketing Director to give transversal support to all marketing team and to focus on innovative projects. Some of the more relevant projects managed by Jordi during this period are the launch of imaginBank, first mobile only bank in Spain, the creation of the Payment Innovation Hub together with Samsung, Visa, Arval and Global Payments, and the opening of the imaginCafe, a physical place for the millennials.

In addition, from 2008 to 2015, Jordi was member of the Mobile Channel Working Group of the European Payments Council (EPC) working on establishing the necessary standards and business rules related to the initiation and receipt of credit transfer, direct debit and card payments through mobile devices under SEPA (Single European Payment Area).

Jordi also joined the Mobey Forum’s Board of Directors in the year 2009, and he was appointed as Chairman of the Board in 2013 leading the association since them. Mobey Forum is a non-profit making, global, financial industry-driven forum, with a clear mission to encourage the use of digital/mobile technology in financial services. Furthermore, Jordi has also been coleading several expert groups within Mobey, as for example the last one, the Open Banking Expert Group, and he has participated in the publishing of several white papers as a result of that.