Top 10 Fintech CEOs to Watch in 2023
Resilience and agility, as well as innovation, are essential to keep a fintech company afloat in these challenging times. Some CEOs not only survive, but thrive when the going gets tough. Instead of cutting costs, they scale, move with the markets and follow customer demands to ensure their services remain relevant. We’ve listed the top 10 CEOs to watch in 2023 as the market continues to test the limits of financial market players.
As the CEO of Kraken, California State University graduate Jesse Powell got into cryptocurrency in 2001. An avid entrepreneur, he first started a startup that helped online players with in-game currencies. He was a great fan of art and also founded the Verge Gallery in Sacramento – the state’s largest contemporary art gallery. But his true passion was Bitcoin and he launched Kraken in 2013. It is now the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US after Coinbase.
Another innovative entrepreneur from Latin America, 25-year-old Brazilian CEO, Henrique Dubugras is certainly one to watch. Always brilliantly inventive, at 14 he got into legal hot water for hacking a video game and putting it online for free. He built his first fintech – the payment company Pagar.me at 16, which is now Brazil’s version of Stripe. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, the first business card of its kind for startups.
Kristo Käärmann comes from Estonia, and grew up in the Soviet era when innovation and fintech were a distant dream. Undeterred, he pursued a career in technology and finance and launched Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) in 2010. Offering international online money transfers at massively reduced fees, Wise expanded rapidly and grew by 70% in 2020 with a reported 10 million customers.
Vladimir Tenev is the Bulgarian-American billionaire entrepreneur, who in 2013 co-founded Robinhood, a US-based financial services company that has brought investing into the mainstream. An accomplished mathematician, he earned his BS from Stanford and his Masters from UCLA, before entering the financial world and launching his first two financial companies before Robinhood. He is on the Forbes 30 under 30, Inc 30 under 30, and Fortune 40 under 40 lists.
Chime CEO, Chris Britt, was previously CPO and SVP, Corporate Development for Green Dot. He also held roles at Visa and was one of the first executives at ComScore. Britt launched Chime, now the largest quasi-bank in the US, in 2013 as a mobile banking app. But Britt is a philanthropist at heart and is a board member of coachart.org, a non-profit organization that connects chronically ill children with free lessons in art and athletics.
Co-founder and CEO of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Brian Armstrong, has played a significant role in introducing users to buy, sell and store major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The former software engineer began his career at Airbnb, where he spent his spare time writing code to enable cryptocurrency trading. His company, Coinbase, was founded in 2012 and now has a customer base of over 35 million users in 100 countries.
This Russian banker has a story almost as colorful as his meteoric rise in the financial industry. CEO and founder of Revolut, he excelled academically, studying for a master’s degree in physics at Moscow University, and also taking a second master’s degree in economics at the New Economic School in Moscow. An athletic student, he became a state champion swimmer and took boxing lessons. Storonsky moved to London at the age of 20 and began working as a financial trader for Lehman Brothers. In 2015 he launched Revolut, and in July 2022 the neobank merged with fellow fintech decacorn Stripe. Today, Storonsky is seen as a mentor and advocate for fintech. He has participated in well over 100 business events globally.
As the CEO and co-founder of Grab, Southeast Asia’s most successful ride-hailing company, and the region’s first ever unicorn, Anthony Tan has enjoyed soaring success in the fintech world.
Headquartered in Singapore, Grab is classified as a multinational technology company. The basis of the innovation is the Grab super app, which provides users with transport, food delivery and digital payment services via a mobile app.
According to reports, the eureka idea came from another HBS classmate when he was studying for his MBA at Harvard Business School, who complained to Tan about the inefficient state of the taxi industry in Malaysia. Grab has expanded beyond recognition, and currently offers its services in eight countries, with offshoots into delivery services, software research and development, and motorcycle taxis.
