By Business & Finance 
Ireland has a vibrant fintech ecosystem and has gained a reputation as a country that is embracing competitive fintech businesses as an ever increasing number of financial services companies look to technology as a means of making their businesses and customer experiences more efficient and profitable.
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.
#Fintech17
Alpha Payments Cloud / Ronan Gallagher
Ronan Gallagher has been chief product officer of Alpha Payments Cloud since 2014, having joined the company two years previously as head of product development. Gallagher has also served as an associate committee member of CNP Payment Forum, and in several senior roles at Arvato Finance Services, where he provided services to companies such as Facebook, Google, AOL and Amazon.
An NUI Galway BComm graduate, he has also worked as a business systems analyst at IBM Ireland.
Alpha Payments Cloud consolidates a wide range of payment systems into one payments-as-a-service platform, known as AlphaHub, achieving compatibility between third-party systems, proprietary platforms and legacy technology.
Accenture / Sinead Barry
Sinead Barry is managing director with Accenture Financial Services and leads the company’s distribution and marketing services practice for financial services in Ireland as well as sponsoring the FinTech Innovation Lab in Dublin.
She has been at Accenture since 2004 and was previously consulting manager at Mazars, and compliance officer at GAM Fund Management.
She is a DCU MBA graduate and a biochemistry graduate of Trinity College Dublin. Accenture Financial Services is active in a wide variety of sectors within fintech, including capital markets, blockchain, talent and organisation, and insurance.
Antuar / Gearóid Power
Gearóid Power is CEO of business solutions firm Antuar, which he co-founded in 2012. A University of Limerick applied mathematics and computing graduate, Power has an MSc in computing from Griffith College Dublin, where he has also lectured.
Power is also a director of Ardan 1 and Xeon Financial Services, and has also worked at firms such as America First Credit Union, Oracle, and Cattles PLC.
Antuar offers a series of ten innovations such as video conferencing and biometrics under the inBranch suite of products and is headquartered at Grand Canal Quay in Dublin’s Silicon Docks.
AQMetrics / Geraldine Gibson
Geraldine Gibson founded AQMetrics in 2012, having left her role as head of professional services at BAE Systems. She has also worked at Norkom Technologies, Susquehana, Oracle and ICL Fujitsu.
Gibson has studied history at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne, as well as information technology at NUI Maynooth, technology management at UCD and an MBA at Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, UCD. She is also a board member of FIT.ie.
AQMetrics is a unified cloud-based platform for automated risk monitoring and regulatory reporting. The company, which Gibson heads as CEO, is headquartered at Maynooth Business Campus and also has a New York office.
Bank of Ireland / David Tighe
David Tighe is head of innovation at Bank of Ireland, which he joined under its graduate training programme in 2000. He is a member of the Fintech Payments Association of Ireland, the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland, and IBEC’s Innovation, Science and Technology Committee.
A Trinity College Dublin arts graduate and former students’ union president, he also has an MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School. Tighe’s main expertise is in financial product management, payments industry trends, digital banking and financial innovation and technology.
The bank, which dates its heritage from the 18th century, is responsible for a series of innovations including the Bank of Ireland Workbench facilities whereby entrepreneurs, bank branches and communities are connected via co-working desks, seminars, clinics and events.
Barracuda FX / Kieran Fitzpatrick
Barracuda FX CEO Kieran Fitzpatrick is a TCD computer science and UCD MBA graduate. With over 15 years’ experience in eFX solutions he joined Cognotec as head of development in 1999 and previously worked for FX hedge fund trading systems provider Beacon FX Solutions.
Fitzpatrick is an industry expert who has spoken at FX conferences in London, New York and Shanghai as well as penning industry publication articles.
Barracuda FX was founded in 2009, and designs and develops enterprise-class FX trading and risk management software for global banking.
BillFaster / Chantel de Paor
Chantel de Paor is co-founder of BillFaster.com, established in 2009. She was previously a Sybiz consultant at CMP solutions, and has worked in numerous roles in the sector with a particular emphasis on accounting, support and sales.
Her aim at BillFaster is to ensure that the system is simple but highly functional, and removes traditional obstacles to accounting systems.
BillFaster is a package of simple accounting software for small business, offering no-hassle accounting and efficient paperwork/bookkeeping functionality such as invoicing, expenses, financial reports and tax compliance.
Bonkers.ie / David Kerr
David Kerr is founder and managing director of price-comparison and switching service Bonkers.ie, where consumers can evaluate utilities and products, choosing appropriately.
Kerr has served in senior roles with the Irish Internet Association and before founding Bonkers.ie founded a childcare business, having previously worked at Xelector and Broadcom Éireann Research.
Bonkers.ie compares gas and electricity, broadband, insurance, banking and personal finance for consumers, as well as helping suppliers to sign up customers. He has a computer science and mathematics degree from UCD and a master’s in electronic engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Brite:Bill / Alan Coleman
Alan Coleman is CEO of Brite:Bill, which he co-founded in 2010. He was previously alliance sales director for Accenture’s EMEA products operating group, responsible for €100m of hardware and software sales.
Coleman has also served at technology startup Macalla Software, and Morgan Stanley in London. He has a degree in maths and computer science from UCD and a master’s from Michael Smurfit School of Business.
Brite:Bill helps companies to overhaul their billing and communications, boosting analytics, efficiencies and customer loyalty. The company has won a string of awards and has offices in London, Madrid, Philadelphia and Toronto as well as Grand Canal Street in Dublin 2.
Bullet / Peter Connor
Peter Connor is co-founder of Bullet, an online accounting and payroll software package particularly suitable for web developers, freelancers, consultants and startups. He was also co-founder of GroupyFit and has worked in numerous senior roles, including head of infrastructure at Rabobank.
Bullet’s accounting and invoicing are free and the system automates small business accounting tasks. It was founded by Connor and John Farrelly in 2010.
Circle / Marieke Flament
Marieke Flament is managing director for Europe at Circle, which she joined last year. She previously held several senior roles at Hotels.com, most recently vice president for EMEA, having joined the group in 2012.
Before Hotels.com she worked with the Boston Consulting Group and LVMH. Flament has master’s degrees from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and an MBA from London Business School.
Circle is a blockchain-based platform for storing and using money and has offices in Boston, San Francisco, Beijing, London and Dublin, where it announced plans to bring headcount to 30 after 300% month-on-month customer acquisition growth.
Coindrum / Lukas Decker
Coindrum CEO Lukas Decker founded travel tech company Coindrum in 2011. An entrepreneur with a distinctively international CV, Decker has worked in Hamburg, Munich, Shanghai and Rotterdam at companies such as Berenschot and Volkswagen.
Decker is a Royal Holloway University of London graduate and has master’s degrees from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, and served on the government’s Advisory Group on Small Business.
Coindrum is an airport-based system of machines that converts loose change into vouchers for duty-free shopping offering 110% of the coins’ value – increasing convenience for travellers, boosting retail, and speeding up security checks.
Coinprism / Flavien Charlon
Flavien Charlon founded blockchain startup Coinprism in 2014. The technology is based on coloured coins that enable users to trade real-world assets such as commodities, stocks and bonds on the emerging bitcoin blockchain protocol.
Charlon previously worked in several senior roles at Microsoft in Ireland, most recently as a software development engineer on Windows Azure, before founding Coinprism as well as bitcoin prediction market Predictious and freelancing website Trezeo. Charlon has a master’s degree in engineering from Ecole Centrale de Lyon.
Corlytics / John Byrne
John Byrne is CEO of regulatory risk intelligence company Corlytics. A serial entrepreneur, he is perhaps best known from having founded Information Mosaic in 1997, selling to Markit two years ago.
Byrne is a Stanford Business School graduate with a degree in electronics engineering, and is a regular regulation and technology event speaker.
Corlytics was founded in 2013 amid an increasing global focus on corporate regulation, and helps companies to reduce their risk via the collection of data and help of legal analysts, risk professionals and data scientists.
CurrencyFair / Brett Meyers
Brett Meyers is co-founder and chief strategy officer of P2P currency exchange CurrencyFair, based in south Dublin. An Australian living in Ireland, Meyers worked at JP Morgan Chase and Law Debenture Corporation before establishing CurrencyFair in 2009, and studied at IMD Business School and the University of Western Australia.
The CurrencyFair platform allows users to send money instantly or choose their own exchange rate and wait, giving customers greater control over foreign exchange.
#Fintech17
