Video Interview with Currency Cloud’s CEO Michael Laven

IntelligentHQ.com in partnership with Groupe INSEEC London presents:  Video Interview with Currency Cloud’s CEO Michael Laven 

In 2011 at GeeknRolla, an unknown startup turned up to pitch their demo and eventually went on to win the admiration of judges in the startup competition. This success was later followed by a $4 million Series-A funding, led by Atlas Venture with follow-on participation from Anthemis Group. Fastforward to 2013 and the Currency cloud has won over the admiration of its peers by doing one thing right- leveraging a Foreign Exchange payments automation platform which disrupts the  old-school world of cross-border business payments, aiming to reduce costs for business and make complex multi-currency payments more frictionless.

The Currency Cloud delivers its service through a number of customers and partners, including remittance, online payments, corporate services (accounting, invoicing, ERP), financial services, and e-wallet firms. More than 250,000 corporates and consumers already have access to The Currency Cloud’s XBPaaS platform through more than 100 platform partners and customers using the XBPConnect API and the XBPCLient infrastructure.

In this second series of IntelligentHQ interviews, Michael Laven talks about the Currency Cloud, its journey and how it is currently disrupting the market place. We also learn about the state of the Payment Industry and the Future of Money.

Panel Questions:

  1. Can you tell us about you and your background?
  2. What is your education background?
  3. Can you tell us about Currency Cloud?
  4. What are the motivations behind the Currency Cloud?
  5. How is Currency Cloud changing the face of the global foreign exchange payments industry?
  6. What are the main considerations about the payment industry online?
  7. Currency Cloud has Over $1 billion of transactions securely processed in 2012, can you tell us about it?
  8. How do you see the Finance and Tech industry landscape?
  9. You have been talking about the Future of Money, can you tell us about it?
  10. How do you see the present landscape of the financial crisis, where we have in one hand innovation, social media and in the other hand crisis, unemployment and banking crisis

About:

Michael Laven  has worked in Financial Services for nearly 20 years. He has successfully led a multitude of FinTech firms as either CEO or Chairman for the past 15 years. These have included Infinity Financial Technology, Iris Financial (Front/Middle office trading & risk management platform and applications) and FRS Global (compliance and risk management solutions).

Prior to joining The Currency Cloud, Mike was Chief Operating Officer of Traiana, a subsidiary of ICAP Plc. Traiana was founded in 2000, and Mike helped lead the firm to become the industry-standard for electronically processing over-the-counter FX, exchange traded derivatives, CFDs and cash equities trades. Traiana became the leading platform for connecting all market participants to automate post-trade processes, reducing the risk and cost of trade processing. He was a key figure in the negotiations that culminated in ICAP Plc purchasing controlling interest in Traiana for $247million in 2007.