By Business & Finance 
At tonight’s Fintech Ireland event in association with Irish Life Health at the National College of Ireland, Business & Finance will put a spotlight on the fintech innovators in one of most interesting emerging industries.
Over the coming years, more investment in the fintech space will drive the shape of the financial services industry for decades to come.
#Fintech17
Deposify / Jon Bayle
Jon Bayle co-founded Deposify in 2014, and is CEO of the deposit management company with operations in Dublin, Boston and New York.
Bayle was previously a solicitor at Matheson for nearly 12 years, where he served as an escrow agent in M&A transactions – giving him the idea for Deposify.
The Deposify system allows landlords and tenants to escrow their rental deposits using Deposify’s mobile app. It has partnered with Bank of Ireland as well as national and regional banks in the US. The system also offers dispute resolution and compliance features.
Ding / Mark Roden
Mark Roden founded the multi-award-winning Ding in 2006. The system allows users to send mobile phone top-up to any phone in the world at any time.
It is currently active in 130 countries with a reach of 4 billion phones on 400 networks, and is headquartered in Dublin with a global headcount of 200.
Roden is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Esat Telecom, founded Torc Telecom, and founding ATM operator Easycash. He has also worked at PwC and Nielsen, and studied at Trinity College Dublin, Stanford University and IMD in Lausanne.
Eagle Alpha / Emmett Kilduff
Eagle Alpha CEO Emmett Kilduff founded the company in 2012. A UCD business and law graduate, he has a master’s from the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business and spent eight years in equity capital and corporate broking at Credit Suisse. He then founded entrepreneurial firm cmypitch.com before becoming an executive director at Morgan Stanley in London.
Eagle Alpha was founded to help asset managers to take advantage of alternative data, which it defines as non-traditional data that is used in the investment process and describes as “the next major change to the investment process”.
Elavon / Eric Horgan
Eric Horgan is country manager for Ireland at credit card processing and merchant services firm Elavon.
A UCD accounting graduate with a master’s in business studies, Horgan first joined Elavon in 2004 following a stint at Trintech. He has also worked at Pinnacle Project Partners and Realex Payments before rejoining Elavon in 2011 to work on strategy and execution.
Elavon now processes over three billion payments, worth over €197bn in total, every year. It is active in 29 countries and has a headcount of over 3,600 employees.
Fenergo / Marc Murphy
Marc Murphy is founder and CEO of client lifecycle management technology firm Fenergo and is responsible for the company’s business operational strategy and corporate direction.
He has led two funding rounds for the growing company, securing a €4m deal with Investec Ventures Ireland in 2013, and achieving $85m with Insight Venture Partners and Aquiline Capital Partners in 2015. He is a DCU software engineering and MBA graduate.
Fenergo’s software aims to assist financial institutions with what it describes a s a ‘perfect storm’ of regulation leading to the collection of additional data and documentation from clients – in turn increasing costs and inefficiencies, and harming the client experience. It is headquartered in Dublin’s IFSC.
Fexco / Denis McCarthy
Denis McCarthy has been CEO of Fexco since January 2015, previously serving as non-executive director at the foreign exchange company.
A Trinity College Dublin mathematics graduate, he has worked as a software engineer at Omnipay and as managing director at Annadale Technologies and Aviso Novate, both of which he founded.
Fexco, headquartered in Killorglin in Co Kerry, was established in 1981 and now employs over 2,000 people processing more than $10bn in transactions every year. It has operations in 29 countries, and recently announced plans to go live with three new banking partners in seven African markets.
Fidelity Investments / Julia Davenport
Fidelity Investments is an international provider of financial services and investment resources and solutions for individuals and institutions. Fidelity has its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts and has offices in most major cities in the world.
Fidelity Investments Ireland was established in 1996 as the organisation’s European offshore development centre. Since then it has continued to expand and invest in its Irish operations with the opening of a second Dublin office and by increasing its head count to provide support for its global operations.
Julia Davenport heads up the Irish operation, which consists of a 500-strong IT workforce and supports the global IT needs of Fidelity, a business with 45,000 employees worldwide.
Fineos / Michael Kelly
Michael Kelly is CEO of founder of Fineos. Established in 1993, the life, accident and health insurance software company offers its AdminSuite platform to some of the world’s leading insurance companies. Fineos’s corporate headquarters is in Eastpoint Business Park in Dublin 3, and the company has facilities in Boston, London, Gdansk, Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand.
Kelly has a degree in computer science from DCU and worked at FBD Insurance before founding Fineos as well as working in the UK, Denmark and Holland with Australian insurance software vendor Paxus Corporation.
Fintech Ireland / Peter Oakes
Peter Oakes is founder and fintech mentor at Fintech Ireland, which promotes, supports and facilitates the fintech scene in Ireland. Oakes is a former director of enforcement and financial crime at the Central Bank of Ireland and has served with a wide variety of boards, companies and organisations since the late 1980s.
A solicitor admitted in Ireland, the UK and Australia, he also has a number of postgraduate diplomas in corporate governance and related fields, and founded the Privacy Ireland initiative earlier this year.
“Every jurisdiction in fintech is going to have its own angle… unless Ireland is out there telling its story, nobody’s going to know about it, and we’re not going to get the business. That’s the real issue,” explains Oakes of Fintech Ireland, which he founded in August 2014.
Fire Financial Services / Colm Lyon
Colm Lyon founded Fire Financial Services in 2008, and serves as CEO. He previously founded and headed up Realex Payments, which was acquired by Global Payments in a €115m 2015 deal.
A well-known industry figure, the UCD graduate has also served as head of central IT at Ulster Bank, director and chairman of the Irish Internet Association, and director and chairman of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland.
Fire offers a MasterCard debit card among services for businesses and personal customers in sterling and euro, along with iOS and Android apps.
First Derivatives / Brian Conlon
Brian Conlon is CEO of First Derivatives, which he established in 1996. A capital markets veteran since 1990, he has worked with KPMG and the risk management department of Morgan Stanley International in London, then joining Nasdaq-listed derivatives software firm SunGard as a capital markets consultant, working with over 60 financial institutions.
First Derivatives is listed in London and Dublin, with 1,700 employees worldwide and headquarters in Newry. Its systems are used by financial institutions as well as telecoms, digital marketing, pharma and utilities-sector clients, and FD is the developers of database technology kdb+.
It recently announced a 30% boost in revenue (to £151.7m) and 20% increase in profit before tax (to £12.5m) for the year ended February 2017.
Fund Recs / Alan Meaney
Alan Meaney is CEO and co-founder of cloud-based reconciliation software developer Fund Recs, which migrates legacy funds industry software to a software-as-a-service offering – the Velocity suite. The company was founded in 2013 and has offices in Dublin and Waterford.
Meaney is a Dublin Institute of Technology graduate and has worked as a fund accountant at HSBC before joining SEI for six years. He has also co-founded collaboration software firm Task Messenger and founded the company partly as a result of first-hand experience of performing manual reconciliations.
Future Finance / Brian Norton
Brian Norton is co-founder and executive vice chairman of Future Finance. A Harvard University and University of California graduate, he has also worked with a wide variety of US companies such as Ridge Road Partners and Arch Bay Capital.
Future Finance became the UK’s first specialist student lender in 2014 and has lent over £50m to students from over 150 universities in the UK. It offers loans of between £500-40,000.
Grid Finance / Derek Butler
Derek Butler is chairman and CEO of Grid Finance, which describes itself as the small business capital platform, established in 2013. He has previously worked at Goodbody Stockbrokers and EY, as well as several roles with PwC. He then joined aid agency Goal Ireland, working as financial controller in Uganda and country director in Haiti.
A chartered accountant, he returned to Ireland in 2013 to take on Grid Finance, an Irish-owned company that believes that “small businesses are the engine of change in society”.
InvoiceFair / Helen Cahill
Helen Cahill is co-founder and joint CEO at InvoiceFair, which was established in 2014. A UCD graduate, she worked at Barclays Bank and Anglo Irish Bank before joining the senior management team of Finance One and then becoming an independent treasury consultant.
InvoiceFair allows companies to generate working capital by selling invoices to investors in an online marketplace environment.
Juggle / Tim Byrne
Co-founded by Eoin and Cian Ó Cuinneagáin and Tim Byrne in 2014, Juggle takes the hassle out of managing personal finances. Juggle empowers people to improve their finances by harnessing their personal data to guide them on ‘a path of financial improvement’.
The Juggle software examines users data and behavioural patterns to guide them through setting realistic, achievable goals. It then presents a picture of what the financial future looks like and helps them to understand the impact changes can have and motivates users to act on them.
An NUIG mathematics and computing graduate, Tim Byrne also has a master’s in management science from Smurfit School of Business and has worked in several roles at Murex.
KPMG / Anna Scally
Anna Scally is international tax partner, head of technology and media, and fintech lead at KPMG Ireland. A UCD commerce/accounting graduate, she joined KPMG in 2000 and has also been involved with the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland, and the Innovation Taskforce.
KPMG Q1 data reveals that the fintech sector is growing in Europe and Ireland is gaining prominence. “The beginning of 2017 saw a number of mature fintech companies announce expansion plans here, including the client lifecycle management company, Fenego,” said Scally.
“Ireland has also successfully attracted a number of fintechs to set up regional offices here, including Kabbage, and we hope to see further growth as Ireland continues to market its ability to be a bridge to both the UK and Europe. In addition, the deadline for implementing Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) is now fast approaching and as we move through 2017, new fintech business models will almost certainly evolve to make the most of open data and to capitalise on new opportunities.”
Linked Finance / Peter O’Mahony
Peter O’Mahony founded peer-to-peer lending community Linked Finance in 2013 in order to connect people with savings to trustworthy businesses that want to borrow. The company claims to have supported over 4,000 Irish jobs as of March, with over 15,000 lenders bidding over €30m to more than 80 companies.
O’Mahony also founded the well-known Laughter Lounge comedy venue in Dublin, chairs the Eden Quay Investment Group, and is a regular speaker on P2P, fintech and SME topics.
LoyLap / Patrick Garry
Patrick Garry is co-founder of LoyLap, which offers enterprise-level software for SMEs to handle customer relationships such as payments, loyalty, rewards and communications. The company was founded in 2012 and has offices in London and New York, as well as its headquarters on Pearse Street in Dublin.
Before LoyLap, Garry worked as an Austrian analyst for Deutsche Bank. He is a Trinity College Dublin graduate of business and German with a master’s in finance.
#Fintech17
