Back office bank MDs discover route to riches via fintech unicorn
At last, after months of disappointing funding rounds and valuation cuts, we may soon have another fintech enter the unicorn club. Crown Agents Bank (CAB) Payments is eyeing an initial public offering in London, and estimates currently suggest the FX focused payments infrastructure provider could surpass a market cap of $1bn.
What makes CAB so special apart from its valuation? The fintech is absolutely stacked with banking talent. It has a minimum of four MDs from investment banks and many more senior officials. 😱
Right at the top is its CEO, Bhairav Trivedi. He founded a payments infrastructure fintech all the way back in 2000 and was made an MD by Citi when it acquired that company in 2008. Trivedi was then Citi's global head of remittance services for three years. Since then, he has held executive roles at a number of other payments fintechs, including Coinstar Money Transfer and Finablr. He founded CAB in 2021.
CAB's other executives also have middle and back office banking backgrounds. CIO David Parker joined from Deloitte where he was an associate, but previously was global head of asset services and settlements at BofA.
CFO Richard Hallet was an MD in product control at Morgan Stanley before assuming departmental CFO roles at both RBS and Barclays. He also joined from a consultancy, Melite Global.
The other identifiable MD is head of transformation Jeremy Parkhouse who was once the lead for anti-financial crime remediation at Deutsche Bank.
CAB's engineers also come from banking - and from fintech. CTO Richo Strydom was a divisional CTO at both Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse in global wealth solutions and solutions and risk technology, respectively. However, he spent five years as COO of digibank Bankable before joining CAB last February.
Senior engineer Chris Moreton spent nearly a decade as an engineer in banking for both Barclays and JPMorgan. Most recently, however, he was a senior Kotlin developer at fintech consultancy 11:FS.
CAB Payments is hiring. Last week it sent out calls for a treasury operations specialist, a business change manager and a senior payments manager. Each role is hybrid, requiring employees to work two days per week at the fintech's Sutton office.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: alex.mcmurray@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
