34. Jaidev Shergill, Managing Partner, Capital One Growth Ventures

Capital One is better known for acquiring software firms outside of financial services rather than rival banks. In 2018 it has acquired Notch, a machine learning consulting firm based in Virginia, as is the bank, and the fraud detection shop Confyrm. The McLean, Va.-based bank also has its own venture arm, headed by Jaidev Shergill. Unusual for a venture arm, Capital One Ventures invests in seed rounds all the way up to Series C. Shergill is a founding member of the team, which launched in 2014, the year Capital One made waves for acquiring the design firm Adaptive Path. Shergill sees startup investment opportunities particularly in the fields of A.I., data, and security. Prior to Cap One, where he also led digital banking for two years, Shergill founded and led a small business analytics startup called Bundle, which the bank acquired. Prior to Bundle, he worked in digital innovation and ventures at Citigroup.

35.  Sergey Vart, CEO and Co-founder, Cereal

The road to working in the financial technology space was not a direct one for serial entrepreneur Sergey Vart. The crypto enthusiast got his start in social media, working for a popular website in Russia called VK.com as a video services advertising executive. Vart went on to found ismashed.ru, a smartphone repair service, which he sold to a venture capitalist. Vart cut his teeth in fintech by becoming CEO of a P2P lending platform, Credeo, and also served at one of Russia’s award-winning fintech companies, Rassrochka24. Crypto lending service, Cereal, which helps bitcoin miners and hodlers turn their crypto assets into cash, was founded in 2017, and utilizes a unique scoring model. “Cereal will adopt blockchain to streamline complex, often subjective scoring procedures, ensuring a high level of security and building trust among the cryptocurrency market participants,” Vart said in a press release.

36. Melissa Stevens, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, Fifth Third Bank 

Since she joined Fifth Third in 2016, Melissa Stevens has helped push for a digital strategy. The former Citi Fintech COO is leading the county’s 13th largest bank into a robust mobile-centric landscape. Formerly the head of Citi’s Consumer Innovation Labs, Stevens gained expertise and experience in markets that span the globe, a skill set that she has brought to her current role at Fifth Third as senior vice president and chief digital officer (and also head of omnichannel banking experiences, digital, design and innovation — busy much?) “At Fifth Third, we know we have to take that technology and harness it and deliver differentiated solutions to our customers so they can accomplish what they need in their banking and get on with the rest of their lives,” she said. “We also believe that customers aren’t comparing us with others just in the financial services industry; they are comparing us to their last best experience.”

37. Lowell Putnam, CEO, and co-founder, Quovo

Before co-founding Quovo, a fintech startup that works with hundreds of financial institutions for account aggregation and bank authentication, Lowell Putnam worked in the investment banking division of Lehman Brothers/Barclays. There he specialized in consumer credit companies and structured finance transactions. The Harvard grad has had the honor of being featured in InvestmentNews 40 under 40 and WealthManagement.com Top Ten to Watch in 2016 lists. Putnam’s thesis is that wealth managers should not just dump data into documents — he has a particular loathing for PDFs, according to a profile in InvestmentNews — they should be telling stories. The means of utilizing data are growing more powerful, and the future will belong to those who know how to harness them.

38. Diane Paredes, CEO, Suade Labs

Diane Paredes was an investment banker feeling heavily burdened by regulation before she co-founded Suade Labs, a regulation-as-a-service platform to help financial institutions understand and deliver their regulatory requirements in 2014. A lot of her work these days revolves around Brexit. Before this, she spent the early half of her professional career serving investment banks in the U.K. Her longest tenure was at Barclays where she was vice president of the bank’s Global FICC Trading department. In the investment banking profession, she covered all types of asset classes at Barclays and Merrill Lynch, across sales, trading, and structuring. She believes that a data-driven approach to regulation is the key to preventing the next financial crisis. She also thinks everyone should try being an entrepreneur: “I genuinely think that everyone should try entrepreneurship, even just as an episode in their lives,” she told Business Insider. “You shouldn’t have any regrets. I guess the fear of failure paralyzes people but the reality is you’re better off trying it out, and realizing it’s not for you, than having that regret. If you look back 50 years, 70 years, most people were entrepreneurs, everyone had a trade.”

39.  Andrée Simon, President & CEO, FINCA Impact Finance

Andrée Simon says FINCA exists to dispel the notion that poor people don’t pay back loans. So the company, founded in 1985, has granted access to credit consumers through the use of 20 micro lenders throughout the world. Simon, who describes herself as a “social banker,” would ultimately like to equalize access to financial services, from the US to Mali. Prior to being CEO, she served as Co-CEO of FINCA Microfinance Holding Company for a year, as well as VP and COO of FINCA International. She also spent several years as President and COO of Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to financial, educational, and interpersonal support of women survivors of war, poverty, and injustice. Simon sees the future in financial services as running over the increasingly powerful mobile networks linking the world. The networks are “empowering ever more people to build small businesses, create jobs, and access essentials for their families, such as education, clean water or solar energy products – all in a financially sustainable way,” she noted at the time of her promotion in 2016.

40. Adam Ludwin, Co-founder, Chain

Adam Ludwin co-founded Chain, an enterprise-level blockchain infrastructure company, with Devon Gundry in 2014, and serves as the company’s CEO. Ludwin and Gundry previously founded the photo-sharing app Koa.la (formerly Albumatic). Personal photo management is certainly a space that could use some blockchainification. Chain works with financial firms such as Visa, Citigroup, and Nasdaq to deliver blockchain solutions. In October 2017, the company announced the launch of Sequence, a cloud-based ledger service. Prior to Chain, Ludwin was a venture partner with fintech-focused firm RRE Ventures, investing in companies including Vine, Slack, Kik, and Paperless Post. He began his career as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, serving clients in the technology and financial services industries. He was also a Business Designer with IDEO. Ludwin holds a B.S. from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard.

41. David Eads, CEO, Gro

As CEO of Gro, a company helping financial institutions digitize their processes, David Eads is responsible for the strategic direction and worldwide operations of the company. He is a frequent industry speaker and veteran of the mobile banking industry. Prior to founding Gro, David was an early employee at mFoundry (now FIS) and Kony, in addition to holding positions at Tealeaf Technology (now IBM) and Spectrum EBP (also now FIS). David also founded Mobile Strategy Partners and is on the board of Xtensifi LLC. “There are a number of processes with the possibility of automation [in banking],” Eads told Bank Innovation in May. “But for business banking, with its smaller number of higher-value customers,” banks are still operating paper-based processes, “stored in manila folders,” Eads said. “The technology that produced the mobile solutions we’re all used to using, the business model of active users doesn’t match business banking.”

42. Martin ljaha, CEO and Co-founder, Neyber

Martin Ijaha grew up watching his mother participate in micro-lending in the African tradition of sou-sou, a pooling of funds. Martin’s background as a technologist and tenure at Goldman Sachs led him to co-found Neyber in 2014. Neyber is a UK-based employee benefits company aimed at simplifying financial services, including financial literacy tools and lending services. Before founding Neyber, Ijaha was a Senior Investment Associate at HIG Capital for almost two years. And before that, he worked at Goldman Sachs for nearly seven years. This work paid off in more ways than one — Goldman led Neyber’s recent £100 million fundraising round.

Simon Paris, CEO, Finastra

Newly appointed Finastra CEO Simon Paris worked at the financial software firm Misys before the company combined with payments platform D+H in 2017 to form Finastra. Paris spoke on the company’s acquisition of Malauazi this week, noting “Together, our two companies deliver a fully integrated open-core platform for payments, lending and digital, across Finastra’s 4,500-strong U.S.-based community market customers and Malauzai’s non-core US-based customers.” Before Finastra, Paris served as president of cloud-computing service SAP for more than eight years. Paris was preceded by Nadeem Syed, who has become a member of Finastra’s board. Paris led the shift to cloud-based services and platform solutions while at Misys.

44.  Jennifer Piepszak, CEO of Chase Card Services, JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase has the largest card business in the country, with $140 billion outstanding, as well as the largest co-brand credit card business in the world. It also arguably has the country’s favorite credit card, the Sapphire Reserve and Sapphire Preferred, highly praised by both NerdWallet, Bankrate and The Points Guy. This astounding success is due to the leadership of Jennifer Piepszak, a 24-year veteran of the firm and CEO of its card services division. Though she is now the queen of cards, she previously served in investment banking, global equities, and several fixed income market businesses. Piepezak attributes her success in business to being a truth-teller: “First — recognize that you have to be one in order to find one,” she said. “And that takes a willingness to ask for help and the openness to accept feedback. Before proclaiming what is and what will be, test the water with a few people who will tell it to you straight. Trusted truth-tellers can help you see your blind spots, roadblocks and friction. Make sure those people are also optimists who see possibilities – and pick fun people, too.”

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