speakers

Funmi is the founder of financial education provider, Hoops Finance, which delivers workshops aimed at simplifying money topics and breaking the money taboo.

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Starting her career as a lawyer in London before moving to work in the legal team of several financial services organisations, her most senior roles were as the Legal Representative on the Executive Committee of a UK bank and as Head of Legal & Compliance at a fintech start-up.

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Outside of the workshops, Funmi writes and speaks about money. She has been a guest on several podcasts, a speaker at events such as the Black Girl Finance Festival 2023 and she is the Host of the monthly roundtables for the Institute for Financial Wellbeing.

Christine is Chief of Staff at Sidekick Money Ltd, a new digital private bank, looking to democratise the wealth industry. Prior to joining Sidekick she built her career as a practitioner in the wealth management industry and as a management consultant.

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In industry, she specialised in financial planning, working for the likes of SJP and Rathbones, supporting clients to achieve their financial goals. As a consultant, she also worked with some of the largest wealth managers and banks in the UK, using her specialist knowledge and experience to help deliver strategic change and high value outcomes for senior executives.

Smitha is currently working in People Operations at Yonder, having first started in human resources almost a decade ago.

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Her current role spans resourcing, onboarding, establishing Yonder's workplace guidelines, benchmarking compensation and developing a positive working culture for the growing team. She was previously working in a similar role at health tech start-up Thriva.

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Smitha also has an MSc in Human Resource Management and is CIPD qualified.

Zhenya has more than 24 years of experience in the Financial Services sector, specialising in payments over the last 10+ years.Her key focus areas within payments include; messaging, connectivity (including real-time domestic & cross-border payments & ISO 20022).

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Zhenya is also an ambassador for the award-winning Women of Fintech community and is listed in the Women in Fintech Powerlist 2022.

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She is currently Head of Marketing for Financial Messaging at Bottomline with responsibility for the GTM strategy. She has previously worked in senior roles at ACI Worldwide, UKASH, and Equifax. She is a regular contributor to industry publications and a moderator and panellist at events such as Sibos.

Araminta is the Founder and Managing Director at Mint Studios, a content marketing agency that helps fintech companies turn their website blog into a customer acquisition channel.

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The Mint Studios team has helped fintech companies including Modulr, Zai, Confused.com and Jeeves use content to bring in $100k+ worth of customers.She also manages the 1,500+ person Fintech Marketing Slack group and conference, is the host of the Market Like a Fintech podcast and Edinburgh's Fintech Mixer events.

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She talks regularly at events hosted by Finovate Europe, Fintech Talents and BrightonSEO.

Vivi Friedgut is a tech innovator and founder/CEO of Blackbullion, the financial wellbeing solution equipping young people with money skills for life.

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Blackbullion’s award-winning platform can be accessed by over 1.2 million students at partner institutions worldwide. The Blackbullion ecosystem empowers students to develop financial knowledge and confidence, be guided by their goals towards better money management and habits using the app as well as access university funding and corporate scholarships through the nation’s largest funding hub.

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Vivi is a former wealth manager, a regular public speaker and author, and was recently named FinTech Magazine’s Top100 Women.

Ola is the Founder of All Things Money, an online platform designed to provide young adults with some of the financial tools needed to help navigate the adulting world.

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All Things Money offers a wide range of personal finance tips and information from topics such as budgeting and saving to investing and mortgages both online and on the All Things Money Podcast.

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Since All Things Money was founded in 2020, Ola has hosted over 100 personal finance talks and workshops to the All Things Money community, Universities, and to corporate organisations such as Accenture, NatWest and Estée Lauder.

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She has also featured in a number of newspaper articles including The Financial Times, The Guardian, Elle Magazine and more.

Ellie Austin-Williams is a writer, speaker and founder of This Girl Talks Money, a financial education platform and community of over 30,000 people.

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As the author of the upcoming financial wellbeing book, Money Talks (Jan 2024), Ellie delivers relatable insights & practical knowledge to help people gain confidence and ownership of their finances.

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Alongside building the community of financially empowered women, Ellie has worked with brands from Glamour to American Express, as well as providing financial expertise for Refinery29, Stylist, BBC News & more. Ellie is also the co-host of the podcast Money Unfiltered.

Smita is a global marketing advisor, influential thought leader, keynote speaker and pioneering advocate for diversity and inclusion in the technology industry.

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She has delivered high-impact global marketing transformations for some of the world’s best-known SaaS, fintech, telco and cloud technology companies.

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She now founder and CEO of the Smita Gupta Advisory, where she advises early- to late-stage scale ups and PE-backed tech firms in fintech, crypto and SaaS spaces.

Freya is part of the ‘Stand out 45’ women in FinTech (Innovate Finance) and has been nominated for the Fintech Woman of the Year 3 years running.

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She is an Associate Director at Willis Towers Watson and the founder of FemTech, an educational platform designed to upskill the next generation of women into Fintech, through tailored 20 minute learning sessions.

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Freya has an extensive background in Product within financial services, with experience from start-ups to FTSE 100’s, creating cutting edge mobile first Wealth Tech.

Araminta is the Strategic Programme Director for Engine, Starling Bank's Software-as-a-Service arm. She helps to shape the organisation’s approach to core banking transformation projects.

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Previously Araminta ran a number of Technology teams for Starling Bank including project management and product delivery.Araminta has a background in operational transformation and Management Consultancy, having previously worked for Accenture.

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For Starling Bank, some of her key achievements include managing the programme to deliver Engine’s in-house Mastercard processor, as well as running the technical integration with Standard Chartered to launch their sustainable savings product ‘Shoal’.

Jeya is the founder of Perpus, a sales consultancy for purpose-driven tech companies. Following an extensive career in sales, she has evolved her role into being an entrepreneur having launched two different businesses in the UK and Canada.

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On a personal level, Jeya has lived in three countries and loves everything about different cultures. She is a huge champion of the value of human connections.

Victoria Newton is Chief Product Officer of Engine, Starling Bank's Software-as-a-Service arm. Engine delivers Starling's market leading cloud native banking platform to financial institutions around the world. She leads on the development of the Engine proposition, understanding the needs of new clients and how the platform can best work for them.

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Before working on Engine, Victoria was Head of Starling’s Marketplace, where she helped build on the selection of third-party financial services available for customers to connect to in-app.

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Prior to this, she was Head of Propositions and Commercial Strategy for the business banking division, where she designed and delivered new products and services to improve Starling’s SME accounts.She started working with Starling in 2018 as a consultant with PwC, and was part of the team that was instrumental in the bank being awarded £100m from the Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF).

Virginia is a VC investor at Eight Roads, a global venture capital firm with offices in London, US, and Asia, and $11bn in AUM, focusing on venture and growth equity investments of ~$10-30m. In her role, Virginia mainly covers Fintech and B2B SaaS opportunities, as well as companies in the Southern European space and in the UK.Prior to her experience at Eight Roads, Virginia worked for 3 years at Citigroup in the Investment Banking team covering the Fintech sector.In 2018 she co-founded Dailyinternship, an HR-tech startup that developed a matching algorithm to combine the preference of the students with the requirements of companies for internship/entry level positions, reaching over 100,000 registered students and 300 clients.

Mariam Ogunbambi is Chief Client Officer of Engine, Starling Bank's Software-as-a-Service arm. Engine provides financial institutions around the world with access to Starling's market leading cloud native banking platform. She leads the management of Engine’s existing clients; responsible for onboarding, implementation through to relationship and success management.

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Her aim is to proactively work in partnership with clients by anticipating their challenges and providing solutions that enable them to succeed and grow using the Engine platform. Drawing on her consultancy background in Financial Services and experience in programme management and operations at Starling Bank, she seeks to work collaboratively with clients and help them reach and exceed their desired outcomes.

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Before working on Engine, Mariam was Head of Card Payments at Starling. Prior to this, she joined in 2016 and delivered integrations between Starling’s own systems and the wider banking, payments and finance landscape. She is the winner of two FinTech Awards; TechWomen50 and Future Stars of Tech - Fintech Category.

Sophie is the co-founder of unlock VC (formerly WVC:E), the award-winning global platform and community for women in Venture Capital. In 2022, unlock VC launched its inaugural one-day Women in Venture Capital Europe Summit at Station F in Paris, bringing together 350+ attendee's and 55+ speakers from across Europe.

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Prior to this, Sophie was aPrincipal at Anthemis' investment team, where she helped discover, evaluate and execute early stage FinTech and InsurTech investments as well as supporting current portfolio companies.

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Sophie has been recognised on the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist in 2020 & 2021 and is a regular on the 11:FS's FinTech and InsurTech Insider podcast.

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