In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with David Wascha, a seasoned product and technology leader whose career spans major names like Microsoft, Travelex, Moo and Zoopla. David opens up about the lessons he’s learned across industries, the evolving role of technology in shaping great products, and how his family life has profoundly influenced his leadership style and career decisions. It’s an honest conversation about ambition, balance, and what it really means to lead with purpose....
Jun 19, 2025•1 hr 19 min
Jason Oakley is the CEO of Afin Bank , where he leads a dynamic and diverse team united by a clear purpose: to redefine value in financial services through innovation, agility, and purpose-driven leadership. With nearly 40 years of experience in banking and investment, Jason has a consistent track record of launching, scaling, and guiding businesses to success across a wide range of markets. At the core of Jason’s leadership is a deep passion for building high-performing teams creating the right...
May 13, 2025•50 min
In episode 41 of Leaders & Founders, we sit down with Nicole Olbe, a true force in fintech and the current UK Managing Director at Adyen UK - one of the world's most innovative payment platforms. With a career spanning Barclaycard, The Logic Group, and Verifone, Nicole brings unmatched expertise in global financial services, strategic partnerships, and payment innovation. She also opens up about her journey into leadership, the challenges and rewards of creating inclusive teams, and why dive...
Apr 30, 2025•34 min
Jas Shah is a Fintech Product Leader, who has spent over 16 years ideating, developing and helping bring products to life in fintech and FS organisations. He's worked with organisations and led the build and launch of Digital Banks, Open Banking Products, Payments Systems, Trading Platforms, and many other FS products for consumers, businesses and enterprise, as well as advising several Seed and Scale up fintechs. It was great to sit down with Jas and discuss all things Product and Fintech. Tune...
Apr 03, 2025•52 min
Hold on tight—this one’s a game-changer! In this episode of Leaders & Founders , we’re joined by the incredible Beth Horn , UK Managing Director at Pinterest —one of the world’s most inspiring and fastest-growing digital platforms. Beth is a powerhouse in the tech and digital space, with an impressive career spanning Meta, Spotify, and search-driven commerce before taking the helm at Pinterest UK. As MD, she’s driving commercial growth, partnerships, and innovation , helping businesses, crea...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Leda is a seasoned fintech executive and former banker, with a career spanning two decades working in transformation and technology functions across a variety of financial services verticals. She is the author of best-selling book‘Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition’ (Taylor and Francis, 2023) and of the upcoming‘Beyond Resilience: Patterns of Success in Fintech and Digital Transformation’ (Taylor and Francis, 2025). She a frequent keynote speaker at flagship industry even...
Jan 21, 2025•54 min
Want to know how to get that promotion you've always wanted? Ever wondered how some people are able to secure such a better package than you, despite doing the same job? Do you want to truly understand why you and only you are in control of your destiny? If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, then this episode if for you! -------------------------------------------------------------- Our first episode back in 2025 brings us incredible insight from Jeremy Burns, Technology Advisor, Lead...
Jan 07, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Jo Drake is a highly accomplished technology leader and current CTO at THG, one of the UK’s most recognisable and successful e-commerce businesses. Once an aspiring professional tennis player, Jo was thrown into the world of technology when a career-ending injury changed her direction of travel. But what a change this was, with Jo’s career becoming a huge success that has seen her lead organisations at some of the world’s most successful technology companies, including THG, Betfair, Skyscanner, ...
Dec 06, 2024•46 min•Season 3Ep. 37
Carl is an inspirational leader that is currently guiding the incredible team at Super Payments as CTO. With a rich history of building and leading high-performing teams at businesses such as Beauty Pie, Funding Circle, GfK and a global credit business, it's safe to say that Carl gets leadership and how to build highly efficient teams. In this episode, we dive deep into what has led Carl to where he is today, as well as the amazing story of Super Payments. In 2022, Super closed one of Europe's l...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Phil is a VP Engineering at Google, where throughout a 9-year tenure he's led a number of technical teams, including the Site Reliability Engineering group for Google Cloud Platform and Google's internal Technical Infrastructure. A UK native, Phil holds a BA in Mathematics from Oxford University and before joining Google, he spent 17 years as Chief Architect at Fidessa, where he led teams that designed and built databases and middleware technology for highperformance trading systems. He's passio...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 43 min
Anyfin was launched in 2017 by Mikael Hussain (CEO), Sven Perkmann (CTO) and Filip Polhem (COO), who together bring more than two decades of experience in helping to build some of Sweden’s leading technology success stories at Klarna, Spotify, and iZettle. Their mission is to help as many people as possible to become the best financially stable versions of themselves. Using new technology, they have developed fair, simple and smart services that help their customers get more from their finances,...
Jan 26, 2022•56 min
Tomas Ohlson is the Founding Engineer at Einride, joining as one of the company’s first 5 employees. Originally from the countryside in Sweden, Tomas grew up on a farm where he was always surrounded by creative minds, passionate about helping those around them. A societal obligation was instilled in him at a young age. Following his passion for engineering, computers and building things, Tomas graduated from university with a Masters in Computer Science and Networks. At University, he met severa...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Matthew O'Riordan is the CEO & Co-Founder of Realtime Tech company Ably. Ably provides cloud infrastructure and APIs to build realtime features like chat, notifications, live maps, loT control. Matt has a very interesting background, coming from South Africa to the UK we hear about his journey. He founded and successfully sold digital consultancy, Econsultancy. We hear about how the idea for Ably came about and how he managed to get the business off the ground right through to successfully a...
Mar 29, 2021•54 min•Ep. 31
Jakub Zakrzewski is the Managing Director of APAC at Kraken Digital Exchange, one of the world's most successful and widely used Cryptocurrency exchanges. As MD of APAC, Jakub guides the team on their growth journey in the region and plays a huge part in allowing the business to scale to meet the incredible demand for their product worldwide. With Cryptocurrency and Blockchain once again being at the forefront of many people's minds in 2021, Kraken are seeing more customer acquisition than ever ...
Feb 19, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Nicholas Goubert is the Chief Product Officer at CLARK, an exciting German-based InsureTech scale-up and has had an incredible career within Product Leadership at some of the most innovative technology companies in Europe. After studying Computer Science and geography at university, he started working in geospatial technology which took him all over the world, working on some very unique challenges. After mixing software development with project management, he then found his way into what is now...
Feb 09, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Sustainability Leadership is the brand new book from Henrik Henriksson, CEO & President of Scania Group and Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, the Founder of the AI Sustainability Centre and former Chief Sustainability Officer at Ericsson. Honest about the dilemmas but bullish on the opportunities, Henrik and Elaine advise leaders on how to accelerate sustainability in their organisations told through a Swedish lens, where the country’s values and culture permeate the boardroom and the C-suite, bring...
Dec 03, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Season 2Ep. 12
For the first instalment in our VC and Investment focused series, we are extremely excited to be joined by the awesome man that is, Hampus Monthan Nordenskjöld. Hampus is a Founding Partner at TrueSight Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in pre-seed and seed stage startups in Europe and the US, with a focus on the Nordics and UK markets. They invest in ambitious founders and teams going after large markets and solving important problems with technology. Truesight support founding teams b...
Nov 26, 2020•48 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Wow...do we have a special episode for you today! We were thrilled, delighted and excited to catch up with our most recent Leaders & Founders guest, Amanda Thomson. Not only is she an absolutely lovely and brilliant person, but a seriously successful entrepreneur with a passion for changing her industry for the better and delivering world-class products. Amanda is CEO and Founder of Thomson & Scott, voted one of Business Insider’s Coolest People in Food & Drink 2019. She is leading t...
Nov 19, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Worldfavor are an exciting sustainability business based in Stockholm, Sweden on a mission to help founders and business leaders all over the world make more conscious and educated decisions when looking to improve their value and supply chain. Through their digital sustainability hub, they harness the power of huge data sets to allow their partners a transparent, real-time view of their entire value chain and how the decisions they make may impact their chain and ultimately, the planet. From a ...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 9
Fredrik Ulvenholm is the CEO of Vilja Solutions, an exciting and leading Swedish-based FinTech organisation that help their clients and customers build beautiful cloud-based core banking platforms that get them to market extremely quickly and reliably. Their future-proof platform ensures compliance, automates internal flows and offers a high level of customer service. It has the shortest time-to-market for launching new products and services, which enables banks and credit institutions to quickl...
Oct 30, 2020•59 min•Season 2Ep. 8
This episode is part of season 2 and the 1st in a mini series around Artificial Intelligence. In this episode we welcome Dr Sindhu Joseph, Founder and CEO of CogniCor. CogniCor are a Cognitive Virtual Assistant Platform, recently named IDC Innovator in conversational AI Platforms 2018, the company has deployed its solution in leading banks, wealth managers, and insurance firms across the globe. Sindhu was a fascinating woman to speak with, she has a Ph.D in AI, was a finalist for Google's Anita ...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 6 min
On this episode of Leaders & Founders, we're bringing you the story of an incredible Swedish-based FoodTech company tackling the huge issue of food waste at food retailers and supermarkets: Whywaste. Whywaste was founded with the singular vision to eliminate the food waste at food retailers. To do this, they develop software solutions to improve in-store processes for grocery retailers. They launched our first solution, Semafor, in December 2015 and have had amazing success in the proceeding...
Oct 09, 2020•51 min•Season 2Ep. 6
OLIO are fast becoming one of the UK's most well-known brands and a huge driving force in driving down food waste across the planet. So, we were more than excited when we got the chance to sit down with Tessa Clarke to understand more about OLIO and the story of her business for our FoodTech & Sustainability series! After a very successful CxO career in a number of industries, Tessa knew that she wanted to make a bigger impact to people's lives. After struggling to give away perfectly good -...
Sep 30, 2020•39 min•Season 2Ep. 5
As part of our FoodTech & Sustainability series, we recently had the opportunity to catch up with a global leader in the world of AgriTech and a true flag-bearer for food sustainability and improvement, Matija Zulj, CEO & Founder of Agrivi. Having enjoyed a very successful career in corporate IT, Matija decided that his next venture would be something that he truly cared about: solving the world's global food problem. After realising that 1 in 9 people globally are undernourished (>79...
Sep 22, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 4
For the second episode of our FoodTech & Sustainability series, we were delighted to be joined by Mo Khodadadi. Mo is the CEO & Founder of SATIS.AI ., a sophisticated AI-driven tech company that help restaurants and food chains to make better decisions in food supply chain. Through a series of computer-vision based models and machine learning technology, they help businesses to become more efficient, safer and a more enjoyable place to work. They are also on a mission to - in his own wor...
Sep 16, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Yuri Misnik is a highly experienced senior technology and thought leader in the world of banking, cloud, data and is a passionate technologist. and innovator at heart. Yuri moved to Abu Dhabi at the backend of 2019, where he took a position as Group Technology Officer and Member of the Group Executive Committee at First Abu Dhabi Bank. In this position, he aims to help FAB continue to evolve and develop their service offering to their customers, whilst also innovating the technology landscape at...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Season 2 is officially here - and what an episode we have for you to kick off the new season! Today, we have the pleasure of being joined by one of Europe's most ambitious and exciting entrepreneurs: Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren. Hjalmar, who appears on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, is a Co-Founder of Karma, an exciting and innovative tech startup based out of Stockholm, Sweden that focus on providing consumers with amazing deals on food, helping retailers and suppliers to save on their food waste...
Aug 28, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Rachel Haines is an Organisational Development Director at Klarna, where she leads a team of 250 people across 35 teams and in every global region which they operate. In her role, it is Rachel's team that are responsible for making Klarna the very best place to work for their amazing teams. Klarna are one of Europe's most successful technology companies. Originally starting in Stockholm, Sweden in 2005 with the simple aim of making shopping online easier for everyone, they are now one of world's...
Aug 10, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Wow - what a treat we have for you today! Our first duo of the series; and what a duo it was! On today's episode of the Leaders & Founders podcast, we were delighted to be joined by Arif Harbott and Cuan Mulligan, senior transformation leaders at AlixPartners. Together, they have designed, led and delivered some of the world's most successful and effective transformation projects and are deeply passionate about their work. Having held posts such as CIO, CTO, CDO and Advisor to some of the wo...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 15
What an amazing story we have today as we are joined by Benjamin Wootton, one of the ex Co-Founders and Global CTO of Contino. This is what it's all about for us: scaling businesses, the challenges, the hard work, VC funding, exits...this one has it all! Ben co-founded Contino in 2014 and quickly helped them become one of the world's most successful Enterprise DevOps and Cloud Transformation consultancies. In his 6 years with the business, they scaled the team to >400 people across the UK, US...
Jul 21, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 14
