Judges

Alison is a payments policy expert with in-depth knowledge and understanding of the payments regulatory landscape in the UK and Ireland.

She is a former FSA/FCA e-money policy specialist and shares this insight from the regulator to clients and contacts alike in her role as director and head of payments in fscom providing compliance advice to leading fintech companies and start-ups.

Alison is leader of the Payment Association’s (PA’s) Regulatory Working Group which engages with key regulatory bodies to push for a fairer and more transparent regulatory landscape for payments companies and serves as ambassador for both the European Women in Payments Network (EWPN) in Ireland and the Fintech Corridor.

Ana-Maria is an experienced delivery manager with a 20 year history of working in the banking and fintech technology industry.

Starting with January 2020, Ana-Maria is co-founder of Smart Fintech, the first third-party provider in Romania authorised by the National Bank of Romania on both open banking services: account information and payment initiation.

Since January 2023, Ana-Maria has been acting as board member of the Romanian Fintech Association. RoFintech was established in January 2020 as a professional entrepreneurial association to represent the interests of Romanian-founded enterprises that are developing proprietary technological solutions. Within the Romanian Fintech Association, Ana-Maria coordinates the Romanian Open Banking Initiative – ROBI. Through ROBI, RoFin.Tech aims to facilitate enhanced cooperation, efficiency, and progress within the local ecosystem, ensuring that the benefits of open banking are fully realised by all stakeholders.

With a master’s degree in innovation and management from 2019, Daniel’s professional career has been dedicated to fostering innovation in the fintech sector. Beginning as head of business development for the startup goscore, where he was invited into the early discussions as one of 12 fintech representatives debating if and how to establish Norway’s first fintech industry association, Fintech Norway. He then transitioned to consultancy roles working with three tech startups, which provided him with valuable insights into everything from securing funding, leading projects and acquiring customers and partners, paving the way for his appointment as secretary-general of Fintech Norway in March 2021.

Guiding impactful initiatives nationally, Daniel played a pivotal role in merging the Norwegian Crowdfunding Association with Fintech Norway, establishing a single, unified fintech association for Norway in 2023. In January 2024, he was also honoured to become a part of the board of the European Digital Finance Association (EDFA).

Beyond his association roles, he served as a senior project coordinator at Link Development for 2 years, securing a transformative innovation contract with Bergen municipality. At Eduplaytion, he contributed to the company’s growth by training key personnel in sales and educational gamification.

For the past five years, he has also served as an assistant professor at both Kristiania University College and Western University of Applied Sciences, lecturing on such subjects as innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital business understanding

Jacqueline Mühlhausen has been shaping the payments industry since 2021, building on her early career in headhunting and advancing into open banking and payments. As an ambassador for EWPN and Fintech Ladies, she champions women in payments, sales, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Passionate about empowering others, Jacqueline is dedicated to driving progress in fintech and fostering inclusive professional environments. 

Joonas Tomperi is the chairman of the board at Fintech Finland, an advocacy group for fintech services in Finland. He is also the chief executive officer and co-founder of Enable Banking, which connects a wide array of companies with most of Europe’s banks through a single open banking API. 

Joonas has many years of experience in the fintech space, with high-level expertise in open banking, data legislation, IT infrastructure, microservices, ERP solutions and more. 

Linda is the EU policy and government relations lead at Wise, as well as the co-president of the European Fintech Association (EFA). The EFA is the first organisation representing fintech companies of all sizes across the EU. It advocates and represents the interests of fintechs at the political and policy level, in particular in relation to the EU institutions and other European regulatory bodies.

Based in Brussels, Linda advocates for policies that further Wise’s mission of making payments instant, convenient, transparent, and eventually free. Prior to Wise, Linda worked for public affairs consultancies in Brussels focusing on financial services and tech policy, as well as at the permanent representation of Latvia to the EU and the European Commission.

Mats is the chief commercial officer for Lunar. He joined Lunar in early 2021 and oversaw a rapid expansion of the company’s Swedish presence, with significant growth in revenue and customers. This led to an expansion of his role to also include Lunar’s presence in the Norwegian market as well as commercial responsibility for Lunar’s activities in the lending space. With over 15 years’ experience of the financial service industry, Mats prior to joining Lunar held key roles at American Express across the US, UK, and Sweden. Mats is also the chairman of the Swedish Fintech Association and Advisory board member at the Swedish Consumer Agency.

Miranda is an award-winning marketing leader with more than 25 years’ experience in strategic and operational marketing in financial services and fintech. Before joining Ecommpay as chief marketing officer, she led the creation, launch and development of the Banking Circle and Banking Circle Group brands globally. Throughout her career, she is proud to have also been responsible for successful marketing programmes for leading professional corporate brands, including Equifax, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Standard & Poor’s.

Passionate about championing the skills and expertise of diverse and underrepresented groups, Miranda sits on the Executive Board of the not-for-profit European Women Payments Networks (EWPN), as well as the Advisory Board of the FinTech B2B Marketing Community.

Philip Creed, co-founder and director at fscom, leads the European Consulting practice of fscom Group, bringing extensive expertise in regulatory compliance and financial crime prevention.

He has built and led fscom’s AML audit practice which conducts over 100 audits annually across the UK and Europe for Tier 1 banks and managed large-scale customer due diligence remediations. Philip has led numerous applications to the FCA and Central Bank of Ireland and supported interim compliance roles at companies like Circle, Wirex, and Gemini.

A member of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland and the Compliance Institute, he has also guided successful Virtual Asset Services Provider registrations and contributed to anti-financial crime initiatives through the Payments Association. Passionate about mentoring, he has helped develop future leaders now working at world renowned fintech companies.

Stefan is an experienced strategy and commercial professional with over 25 years in the fast-moving tech sector and involved from the outset with the emergence of the internet, cloud, SaaS, IoT, AI, blockchain and digital transformation in sectors incl. tech, financial services, fintech, cleantech, healthtech, smart cities, digital or telecommunication. Projects ranged from innovation and growth strategies, to ecosystem analysis, market assessment, business requirements analysis, UK market entry, end to end technology infrastructure analysis or digital transformation strategies.

Yvonne de Ville is the chair of the Finance and FinTech Group with the Institute of Directors. She is a finance and fintech activist and voice for women in finance and tech.

Yvonne has more than 20 years of experience in supporting and managing international programmes and business changes/transformations within Credit Suisse, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Travelex, Clifford Chance, Schroders, and PwC.

Zóltan started his career in economic journalism, before founding his own media start-up in 2011, which completed a successful financing round under his management. As head of innovation at Design Terminal, he had worked with over 200 startups for eight years. After, as a consultant, he worked in various sectors (FMCG, financial sector, manufacturing industry and defense industry) focusing on innovation management.

In 2020-2021, he served as the director of innovation at MKB Fintechlab (MKB Incubator Ltd.). From 2022, he became the chief executive officer of MKB Fintechlab (later MBH Fintechlab) and the head of innovation at MBH Bank. Since 2014, he has been a part-time lecturer at several universities (Moholy-Nagy University of Art, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest Business University). He is an active angel investor and also the chairman of the Hungarian Fintech Association.