By Chris Skinner via Iris.xyz
It’s interesting that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) sparked by Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008 sparked the FinTech revolution, according to some. I personally think FinTech was bubbling away before the GFC but, certainly, the GFC led to massive investment focus upon changing the system (almost $100 billion since 2010).
Equally, the collapse of Lehman Brothers did lead to lots of former investment bankers launching FinTech start-ups. One example is Revolut, “a secure, mobile-based current account that allows you to hold, exchange and transfer without fees in 25 different currencies”. Recently valued at $1.7 billion, it’s a FinTech unicorn created by Nikolay Storonsky, a former employee of Lehman Brothers. And it’s not the only one.
Many bankers have left the banks to found start-ups in FinTech, such as:
Anil Stocker, co-founder of MarketInvoice
Founder Anil Stocker worked at Lehman Brothers before it collapsed, while his co-founder Ilya Kondrashov is a Goldman Sachs alumnus. This peer-to-peer lending platform lets companies borrow against unpaid invoices online. £400 million ($612 million) has been lent since launch and lending volumes are growing by an average of 30% each month.
Ronnie Mateo, CEO of Trumid Financial
A former Salomon Smith Barney VP who left the firm for the buy side only to return to Citi and rise to MD, Mateo became CEO of Trumid, an electronic-trading platform for corporate bonds, in 2014. It has secured $82m in funding from investors including Deutsche Börse, CreditEase, Peter Thiel and George Soros.
Giles Andrews, Executive Chairman of Zopa
Zopa was created by a group of former bankers involved in the launch of Egg, an online banking service in the 1990s. Zopa was a pioneer in peer-to-peer lending in the UK. Its platform lets people lend money to consumers and it passed £3 billion lent over the platform this year. Zopa has also partnered with challenger bank Metro Bank to offer loans to consumers over its platform.
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