Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3

"I thought, I'll just hand it off to my team to go and build. And I realised I didn't have a team."

In this episode of Work in Fintech, Mattew Cheung sits down with Antony Jenkins, Founder, Chair and CEO of 10x Banking and former Group CEO of Barclays, to explore why he walked away from running one of the world's biggest banks to start a fintech in his mid-50s.

10x Banking started with a frustration Antony lived for decades. Even as a senior executive, launching a simple new mortgage or credit card took 6 to 12 months, because the technology underneath banks was never built for change.

What began as a few pages written at his dining table in 2016 became 10x Banking, a cloud native core banking platform that runs the systems behind banks: recording customers, accounts and every transaction, at the resilience and security standards that people's money demands. Today, 10x works with major financial institutions, from new digital banks to established banks migrating off legacy technology.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How an ordinary Manchester childhood sparked his love of business
• Why winners make life 10x better, not 10% better
• What comes next after branches halved
• Why banks still take months to launch simple products
• Going from Barclays CEO to a startup of one
• Why early-stage people aren't always right for scaling
• How AI agents will reshape lending, fraud and commercial banking
• Why AI won't automate every job
• How degree apprenticeships could reshape education
• Why he hires for curiosity over AI skills
• What he'd do differently starting out today
  
  

Subscribe to Work in Fintech for more conversations with the founders, operators and investors building the future of financial services.

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Alvin Wang Graylin, Digital Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) a, returns to Work in Fintech to explain why the AI jobs shock is years away, not decades. He puts it plainly: most thinking work could be replaceable within 3 to 10 years, and around 1.5 billion people worldwide will be affected in the near term.

With host Matthew Cheung, Alvin explains why new graduates are hit first, why 10 to 40% unemployment would push society into chaos, and what the GI Bill teaches us about getting through a transition this big. He also makes the case that scarcity, not human nature, made humans violent, and that AI could be what finally ends that scarcity.

Connect with Alvin Wang Graylin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/agraylin

Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

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Before Blockchain.com became one of the biggest names in crypto, Nicolas Cary was just a curious entrepreneur experimenting with technology.

He started making money as a kid mowing lawns and selling clams. Later, he built websites as a teenager, including one he traded for lifetime sandwiches.

Then came the 2008 financial crisis.

Watching the financial system collapse changed how Nicolas thought about money. When Bitcoin arrived, he saw something different: the possibility of building an entirely new financial system.

What started with a couple of guys in a small apartment in York eventually became Blockchain.com.

But the journey wasn't easy.

Crypto crashed. Markets collapsed. People lost interest. Through every cycle, Nicolas and his team kept building.

In this episode of the Working Fintech Podcast, Nicolas Cary, Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of Blockchain.com, shares his incredible journey, from his early entrepreneurial experiments to discovering Bitcoin, building through multiple crypto cycles, and what he believes young people should do to prepare for the future.

We discuss:

→ Why the 2008 financial crisis led him to Bitcoin
→ The early days of Blockchain.com in a small apartment in York
→ What it takes to survive multiple crypto boom and bust cycles
→ Why listening to customers is one of the most important founder skills
→ Why entrepreneurship is a long game
→ Why you don't need to live in Silicon Valley to build a global company
→ Why traditional career advice may no longer work
→ The skills young people need in an AI-powered future

"The jobs of tomorrow are being forged by your curiosities today."

Connect with Nicolas Cary:
https://x.com/niccary?lang=en 

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Betsy Cohen has spent decades identifying opportunities before they become obvious.

From becoming a bank founder after a career in law, to building fintech infrastructure, sponsoring SPACs, and investing in the next generation of financial technology, Betsy has built her career around one principle: look for what isn’t being done.

In this episode of Work in Fintech, Betsy Cohen, Co-Founder and Chairman of Cohen Circle, shares how she spots opportunities, evaluates founders, and recognizes the “negative space” where new businesses can emerge.

She discusses:

• How she finds winning opportunities
• What she looks for in founders
• Why great teams with average ideas can still win
• How founders need to adapt and pivot as the world changes
• What she learned from watching companies navigate COVID
• Why she invests at the beginning of cycles rather than the end
• Her take on OpenAI, Anthropic & SpaceX draining capital markets
• How young people should think of their careers
• Why AI skills are becoming as fundamental as knowing the alphabet

Her philosophy is simple: keep your antenna up, look for the gaps, and make something out of nothing.

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Carlos Menendez was born in Puerto Rico, the oldest of five children of Cuban immigrants who left the island with nothing. The family settled in Miami in the 1970s, where money was tight and both parents worked. What his parents drilled into him was simple: the one thing nobody can take from you is what's in your head. Excellence wasn't a lofty ambition in that household, it was the condition for eating. 

He spent his childhood summers in the local library, partly because it was the only place with air conditioning. He graduated from Harvard into the 1991 recession and sent out roughly 80 applications before landing his first job at Procter & Gamble. 

Fourteen years at Citigroup and fourteen at Mastercard followed, running cards across 18 countries and launching contactless travel with Transport for London. Two years ago he left one of the most senior seats in global payments to become COO of dLocal, a Uruguayan fintech now past $1B in revenue.

In this episode Carlos unpacks:

• The future of global payments
• How dLocal operates across emerging markets
• AI, fraud detection & agentic commerce
• Building trust in regulated industries
• Career advice for young professionals
• Leadership lessons from 30+ years in fintech
• Why emerging markets are shaping the future of commerce

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Today's guest is Esfira Zakas, CMO at payabl, one of Europe's fastest growing payment service providers, and the engine moving money for merchants across the continent, from online checkouts and POS machines to multi-currency accounts and card issuing, at a company that has scaled to over 300 people.

Esfira describes herself as marketing agnostic. Before fintech she worked across insurance, logistics through COVID, and a string of tech and startup companies, driven less by any one industry than by a childhood dream of being Don Draper from Mad Men. Advertising was in the family. Her father sold ad space for the local newspaper and her brother works in social media strategy, so she was watching Mad Men before it was cool and always knew she wanted to build brands.

What makes her story unusual is how she landed in fintech, and where she started. Originally from Riga and now based in Vilnius, she was payabl's first hire in Lithuania, with no office and no colleagues to learn from. 

Her first workspace was a free co-working desk in a shopping mall sponsored by Ikea, so for months every internal and external call went out with a giant Ikea logo behind her while she ran back and forth between the mall and her car. She knew nothing about payments beyond how to tap her card. Four years later she runs a 20-person marketing team and is General Manager of payabl's Lithuanian business.

This conversation moves from that early career into how a challenger brand actually competes: what it takes to market payments against the giants, why fintechs are betting on sports, and how AI is reshaping marketing without replacing the people behind it.

In the full episode, we cover:

• Why fintechs are pouring money into sports sponsorships
• How a challenger payments brand stands out against giants like Stripe
• Why she won't let her team go all-in on AI, and where it actually helps
• How she learned fintech from scratch as the only person in the room
• Scaling a marketing team from 5 to over 20 people across Europe
• What she looks for when hiring, and why curiosity beats a polished CV
• Her advice for young people trying to break into fintech
  
  

Connect with Esfira Zakas:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/esfira/

Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

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Today's guest is Emma Hagan, CEO of ClearBank UK, the UK's first new clearing bank in over 250 years and the infrastructure quietly powering some of fintech's biggest names, from Revolut and Tide to Coinbase, across around 280 financial institutions.

Emma has spent her career at the intersection of banking and regulation, from a graduate programme at HBOS, an incumbent of roughly 75,000 people, to a decade at Silicon Valley Bank, where she joined a 1,400-person business to run the project that won its UK banking licence and went on to become Chief Risk Officer for EMEA. 

She joined ClearBank in 2020 as Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and rose to lead its UK business.

What makes her story unusual is where it started. She studied law fully intending to become a lawyer, then changed course after a City internship and landed in banking almost by accident through a graduate scheme. A self-described natural introvert, one of her formative early jobs was selling bus tour tickets on the pavements of London, a role she found deeply uncomfortable but credits with teaching her to put herself out there.

This conversation moves from that early career into the machinery underneath ClearBank: what a clearing bank actually does, why it took 250 years for someone to build a new one, and where stablecoins, AI and embedded banking fit into the future of moving money.

In the full episode, we cover:

- What a clearing bank really do
- Why it took over 250 years for a new clearing bank to launch
- How ClearBank became the infrastructure behind big fintech
- Why she moved from risk and compliance into the CEO seat
- How stablecoins and tokenised deposits are becoming a real means of cross-border payment, not just an asset
- How ClearBank thinks about AI
- What embedded banking actually means
- The new EU licence, the "dollar corridor," and where ClearBank goes over the next five years
- What she looks for when hiring, and why comfort with pace beats a polished CV

Connect with Emma Hagan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-hagan-86ba9b10/


Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

Check out our website and subscribe to our mailing list to hear more about opportunities in fintech and web3.

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Today's guest is Greig McEwan, Chief Technology Officer at Funding Circle, the UK's leading SME finance platform, which has extended over £17bn in credit to more than 125,000 small businesses. 

Greig has led technology at scale across very different worlds, from CTO of Paddy Power Betfair operating across 100 countries, to advising WorldRemit on payment strategy, and now building the engine that decides who gets lent to, and how fast.

What makes his story unusual is where it started. He took a non-technical degree in Glasgow, covering politics, economics, a bit of psychology and sociology, and got into tech as a trainee programmer with no real experience, just an aptitude for learning. 

This conversation moves from that early career into the machinery underneath Funding Circle: how a lending decision actually gets made in seconds, what it really means to become an AI-native organisation, and why he believes the role of an engineer is being redefined in real time.

In the full episode, we cover:

What happens in the 9 seconds between "apply" and "approved," powered by a 9th-generation decision engine

How 15 years of lending data gives Funding Circle a 3x risk edge over bureau-only scoring

Why a customer interaction every 38 seconds keeps feeding the model

Why he hires product engineers, not software engineers, now that code is being commoditised

The difference between AI-native and AI-first, and why Funding Circle chose one

Why he is "not at all sceptical" about AI, against the industry grain

How one engineer did three years of work in three days with Claude Code

How Funding Circle keeps bias out of lending decisions, with humans still in the loop

Why cybersecurity went from strategic to board-level imperative
His advice for anyone starting out: just start, and ignore the limits you assume

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Today's guest is Mark Mullen, co-founder and CEO of Atom Bank, the UK's first app-based bank and the first digital challenger to win a full UK banking licence. 

Mark is a self-described accidental banker who read history at university, spent 24 years inside HSBC Group, and ran First Direct, one of the most innovative banks of its era. 

Then, in his mid-40s, he walked away from a comfortable seat at the top of the industry to build a bank from scratch in the Northeast of England, not London. 

He has watched telephone banking, internet banking and mobile banking come and go, and now sits inside the AI wave trying to work out what it actually changes and what it does not. 

This conversation goes past the technology and into the things that endure: trust, people, and why the UK banking sector is still far less disrupted than everyone assumes.

In the full episode, we cover:

- Why banking was "made to be digitalised", and who wins because of it
- How Atom uses Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools in their workflow
- Why AI could cut a third of operating costs in three to five years
- Why the same banks still dominate UK mortgages a decade on
- Why Atom runs a four-day week, and why Mark keeps defending it
- The one trait Mark values most when hiring young people
- His advice for anyone starting out in the AI era

A masterclass in building for the long term, from someone who has done it without the hype. Worth your time whether you are in fintech or not.

Connect with Mark Mullen:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mullen-5330458a 

Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

Check out our website and subscribe to our mailing list to hear more about opportunities in fintech and web3.

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Today's guest is William Quigley, one of the few venture investors who has operated at the centre of multiple technological inflection points. William was one of the first institutional investors in PayPal, co-founded Tether, the world's first and largest fiat-backed stablecoin, and founded WAX, one of the most active NFT blockchains globally.

He saw the consumer internet emerge, watched payments transform, helped shape crypto infrastructure, and now sits at the edge of the AI wave. This is our third conversation with William, and a lot has changed since we last spoke 18 months ago. This time we go beyond the cycles and into the structural future: who owns the rails, how capital actually flows, and where the durable infrastructure is forming beneath the hype.

In the full episode, we cover:

- Why AI is the opposite of the early internet and early crypto, and why that should worry you
- Why the economics of today's AI companies are inverted, and how long they can really last
- Why he backed PayPal and built Tether but will not invest a dollar in AI
- How VCs boycotting semiconductors for 25 years accidentally created NVIDIA
- Why OpenAI and Anthropic may go public and still struggle as public companies
- The trillion-dollar currency conversion tax that tokenised money could erase
- Why NFTs are not dead, just rebranded, and where the real use cases are growing
- The one trait William looks for in every founder and CEO, and why he thinks you are born with it
- How young people should position themselves while it is still early

If you are a fintech founder, an investor trying to read the AI cycle, or anyone working out where the durable opportunities are forming beneath the hype, this one is worth your time.

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