The number of UK FinTech female founders and CEOs remains stubbornly low.
According to Innovate Finance’s latest Venture Capital Investment Report, only 17 per cent are set up by women, a frustrating statistic for an industry that aims to foster fairer and more inclusive financial services.
While the reasons for the lack of female leadership are varied and complex, what remains clear is that women make great FinTech entrepreneurs and often outperform many male-led start-ups.
Here are 10 up-and-coming UK female FinTech firms to watch out for, according to leading investors, industry peers and influential champions.
eXate Technology
Pioneering regulatory technology co-founded by Sonal Rattan, who also serves as the company’s chief technology officer. eXate offers solutions that protect sensitive data to enable firms to use cloud technologies, as well as to comply with cross-border data transfers and global data.
FriendlyScore
A solution that analyses social and online data to assess borrower risk and default probability, also known as social credit scoring. This is an alternative approach to credit scoring that is used to assess borrowers that lack historical data, such as students, foreign nationals, and underbanked populations. Led by CEO Lubna Bazine, FriendlyScore looks at social media and online profiles to gain insight into personalised, internationally standardised, verifiable data on potential borrowers, that can be easily packaged for lenders.
Funding Xchange
Katrin Herrling is the CEO and co-founder of Funding Xchange, a platform that is transforming the mediation of the SME lending sector., which is serving a critical need for SME businesses to obtain finance in minutes rather than days or weeks as is currently the case. Funding Xchange makes it easy for businesses to compare competing quotes from a range of finance providers, giving them access to a broad panel of finance providers who want to fund them, as well as the knowledge to make the right decision about their finance choices.
Goldex
The world’s first ethical gold trading platform. Co-founder and CEO, Sylvia Carrasco, has developed a revolutionary mobile app that allows consumers to invest in physical gold and get the best price every time, whether they buy or sell. All gold is responsibly sourced, insured and securely stored in professional vaults.
iNBOTIQA
CEO Liza Russell leads a team of innovators behind this new enterprise business email solution. iNBOTiQA is aimed towards high volume and group mailboxes in financial institutions, and improves productivity and customer service levels through workflow management in middle and back offices. The new start-up is a 2019 London alumni of the prestigious Barclays Techstars Accelerator.
Plural AI
Camille Rougié is CEO and co-founder of this a knowledge-based search engine platform, which offers answers to financial market questions with data analysis on financial companies and market. The results help financial investors make informed decisions without depending on human assumptions.
Smarter Human
A technology that lets digital banks and FinTech firms manage operational risk as a part of the agile product delivery lifecycle so that managing risk and compliance is no longer a bottleneck to innovate. Francesca Gomez is co-founder and CEO of the company, which is also an alumni of Barclay’s 2019 Techstar programme. Francesca and Liza Russell from iNBOTIQA were the only female leaders out of the 10 FinTech start-ups selected by Barclays.
VeeLoop
Winner of this year’s UK women in payments unicorn challenge, this online payment approval service co-founded by CEO Randa Bennett, enable teens and tweens to shop online safely and independently. The teen picks what they want their parents to buy for them, and then they send the basket of items to their parents. The designated ‘paying’ parent then checks the items and pays at their own convenience, wherever they are. The solution keeps ‘everyone in the loop.’
Taina Technology
A RegTech firm setup and led by CEO Maria Scott, Taina has created an automated software services that allows banks to process the tax forms required to meet compliance regulations in seconds, rather than the varying amounts of time it can take to do so manually.
Wealthify
An independent roboadviser investment platform backed by Aviva, which invests in equity traded funds (ETFs) to keep clients’ investment costs to minimum. Co-founded by Michelle Pearce-Burke, Wealthify uses and automated process to create portfolios that align with a client’s appetite for risk.
Georgia Hanias is a FinTech and diversity specialist and founder of London-based consultancy firm Ecology Media