The Fintech Foundation incubator programme

Amar is responsible for developing and managing relationships with key Fintech ecosystem partners at Integrated Finance.

As a startup enthusiast, Amar regularly advises Fintech founders. He heads up the Integrated Finance Fintech Foundation incubator programme, designed to support and empower the launch of early-stage Fintech startups.

Before joining Integrated Finance, Amar was part of the founding team of a UK-based neo-bank, taking innovative products to market and building cross-industry partnerships.

Amar is a dog-lover, an avid traveller and enjoys playing golf, admittedly not as well as he’d like to.

Daniel, a serial Fintech entrepreneur/investor, is responsible for shaping and delivering the Integrated Finance commercial strategy and operations to make financial infrastructure accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Before co-founding Integrated Finance, Daniel co-founded another company in the technology space and held senior commercial positions where he successfully delivered industry-leading innovations within the FX, travel and renewable energy sectors.

Driven by his mantra of "made by founders for founders", Daniel continues to serve as a Business Advisor/Investor at Sandbox.game, Science Card and OpenPayd.

David has been an ever-present figure at Currencycloud since the early days and has held a number of roles during his time at the company, including Head of Client Support and Head of Solutions. His depth of knowledge of the Fintech industry and the nuances of cross-border payments would have you finding it hard to believe he was once a trainee solicitor.

These days he is our Programme Director for Strategic Partnerships, working with the Currencycloud partner ecosystem to deliver best-in-class cross-border payments solutions for end users.

Derren Powell leads UK&I Business Development for Fintech at Mastercard. Whilst card issuance is his sweet spot, aligned to Mastercard’s multi rail strategic intent, Derren acts as a conduit and access point to Mastercard’s products, services and assets (globally).  

With over 20+ years of experience in Financial Services, With partnership at his core, Derren brings a wealth of knowledge and valuable insights across multiple verticals and markets. 

Derren's golden rules in his day-to-day professional life are authenticity, humility, integrity and transparency.

Kanisha runs ComplyAdvantage's start-up program, ComplyLaunch, which helps early stage fintechs get up and running with their compliance program.

With access to ComplyAdvantage's award-winning AML and KYC tools and resources, startups can grow with integrity and confidence while keeping costs under control.

Having spearheaded the initiative since launch, Kanisha has helped implement compliance solutions across ComplyAdvantage's global customer base, and has a unique insight into the compliance challenges faced by this cohort.

Michael has 7+ years of experience in the Fintech industry and in supporting fintechs launch payment cards.

At Enfuce, he has been responsible for project and customer lifecycle management in varied roles. He has worked closely with payments processing, card issuing for both VISA and Mastercard, added-value services such as mobile wallet payments, fraud monitoring, and areas within the lending segment.

One of the most satisfying parts of his work is seeing a payment card programme he helped launch take off and disrupt the industry!

Alia is a qualified risk and compliance professional with over a decades' experience working with global financial institutions and Fintechs, advising on legal, risk and compliance processes to deliver cross business innovate control solutions and policy.

Having completed her undergraduate in Law from the London School of Economics and Legal Practice Course from BPP University, she started her career in criminal law as a trainee solicitor. With a mission to proactively (as opposed to reactively) disrupt organised crime and help reduce the myriad of financial crimes taking place, she transitioned to a career in financial crime and regulatory compliance, to be at the frontline in combatting financial crime risks and safeguarding organisations and communities from being used and abused by criminal organisations.

Now part of the Global Regulatory Affairs team at ComplyAdvantage, Alia supports product, marketing and commercial teams with building world leading financial crime detection tools and is the 'voice of the customer' as Customer in Residence, ensuring all customer pain points and objectives are translated into the products developed to solve for all these needs.

Tom is an experienced Business Development Specialist with 9+ years of experience within the fintech & payments industry. During his career, he has been successful in planning and implementing robust business development strategies as well as developing relationships with organisations to uplift revenues through organic account growth.

His career highlights include launching some of the most successful fintech card programmes across Europe and Asia, developing business opportunities with world-leading organisations, and collaborating with fantastic teams across multiple regions to deliver great products.

Tony Petrov has been Chief Legal Officer at Sumsub since 2018. He is an experienced blockchain and Fintech attorney with a focus on AML and KYC compliance, data privacy and international regulators’ relations.

Tony holds a master’s degree in Transnational Business Law from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in the city of Sacramento, California.

He also studied IT Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Being a certified CySEC AML Compliance Officer, Tony is the author and host of the YouTube channel "Sumsub for experts". 

Fiona is the co-founder and CEO of ComplyFirst, a fast-growing regtech on a mission to simplify FCA regulatory reporting for fintech’s. ComplyFirst transforms the manual, time-consuming process of preparing reports with its Regulatory-Reporting-as-a-Service (RRaaS) platform which is supercharged with regulatory logic and third-party integrations, offering fintech’s control and saving them time and money.

Fiona is a lawyer with 10 years of proven success in regulatory financial services spearheading global initiatives for fintech’s and banks. She understands foreign exchange, payments, fintech and SaaS. From founding businesses to securing authorisations, reporting, and engaging with regulators, she has been there done that, got the scars and big wins.

Fiona’s a strategic thinker and entrepreneur. She recently closed ComplyFirst’s pre-seed funding round and is busy building out a team of deep-domain regulatory experts and talented engineers. She isn’t averse to a glass of wine and balances this out with plenty of Pilates.

Jim is a Co-Founder & Managing Director at StrategyBRIX, a Compliance consultancy designed for fintechs, Crypto companies and Banks. He has extensive experience working for major brands, including PwC and Quantexa, which involved building end-to-end global Financial Crime programs across banks and fintechs.

Jim is passionate about working with Fintech businesses and understanding how criminals try and take advantage of innovation to launder their illegal proceeds, finance terrorism or commit fraud. As a Fintech Foundation Mentor, Jim is looking forward to working closely with each Fintech startup, understanding products in great detail and helping to build robust Compliance programs in line with their requirement and maturity without hindering innovation and growth.

He is based out of London and oversees the company's operations in EMEA.

Before founding PitchSpace, Serkan worked with startups for 7 years and helped 100+ founders to build their pitch materials, either directly or through Virgin Startup’s accelerator programmes.

Having seen a 98% success rate in the investment deals he was involved, he realised all founders were struggling to build a compelling pitch. The process was painful, time-consuming and expensive.

He brought his team together to turn all this experience into an algorithm and built an automated pitch builder that helps founders to build a strong pitch through a conversational experience that doesn’t involve any templates or design tasks.

To him, the biggest reward of founding PitchSpace has been the opportunity to connect with thousands of fellow founders which made the journey less lonely and more enjoyable.

His ambition for PitchSpace is to make the pitch entirely self-built and launch the first early-relationship building platform for stakeholder economy.