Kalgera's new advisory board

July 14^th 2021 London – Kalgera is unveiling its new advisory board today as the company sets its strategy for future growth through enabling banks and financial institutions to identify and protect vulnerable customers from financial harm.

The RegTech platform is bringing on a multi-disciplinary bench of new advisors from sectors including banking and fintech with expertise including fundraising and communications marketing.

Earlier this year the FCA issued guidance for financial institutions in terms of protecting vulnerable customers, especially with the additional stresses brought on by Covid-19.

Founder and Chief Executive Dr Dexter Penn said:

“It is crucial for us to find new ways of protecting vulnerable customers – especially as we begin to recover from the pandemic – in which banks and other financial institutions will have a key role to play. Kalgera’s thoughtfully designed platform delivers the tools to enable this, bringing companies in line with regulatory guidance while delivering operational efficiency as well as protecting the customer. We are delighted to have assembled an advisory board of this calibre to guide us in the next phase of our growth.”

‍

The new Advisory Board members are:

Helene Panzarino, who was originally a Commercial Banker, is an Associate Director with the Centre for Digital Banking and Finance in LIBF, an experienced FinTech Programme Director, exited entrepreneur, educator and author. Her career boasts a number of ‘firsts’, including the creation of the FinTech Scale Colab Programme for Rainmaking, the Inaugural Programme of Education and Events for Innovate Finance, the FinTech on the Entrepreneurship Masters’ for UCL. Additional board and advisory roles include the Spanish digital identity scale up, Biid and the SME payments company, TomatoPay.  Helene was named on the Computer Weekly 100 Women in Tech Award, the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List, and the Fintech Magazine 100 Women in Fintech list. She took part in the FCA 2020 Data Sprint on post-Covid SME Lending. Her new book ‘Reinventing Banking & Finance: Frameworks to navigate global fintech innovation’ (Kogan Nov 2020) and was named the number one banking book for 2021 by Investopedia.

Richard Zirps has over 25 years international banking & capital markets experience with focus on Debt Capital Markets/Fixed Income Origination. Having worked at Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and NWM formerly known as ABN AMRO/RBS, his clients include public sector banks as well as their owners, commercial banks, insurance companies, special credit institutions and agencies as well as corporates. Following his banking career Richard set up Alluvium Capital Ltd specialising in advising “Best in Class” UK FinTech companies and introducing them to his Bank, Insurance, Agency, Asset Manager, Regulatory and Corporate contacts.

Chris Kelsall is Chief Executive of Tokamak Energy.  He previously served as Chief Financial Officer, following his appointment to the Board of Directors in 2020. Chris has 30 years’ international experience spanning commercial, financial, legal, operational and business transformation roles. This includes leadership positions in private and listed companies in the energy sector. As Chief Operating Officer for HSBC Global Banking Europe, Chris was responsible for operational delivery and risk management in countries, including the major hubs in the UK, France and Germany. He also led the delivery of major business transformation projects within the bank, including Brexit. Chris holds degrees in Economics and Law, with a Masters in Finance from London Business School.

Hugh Furness is a specialist in achieving profitable operations through cost-effective management of resources and quality performance. Hugh has over 20 years of experience in developing teams, go-to-market and business development strategies, as well as the development and execution of operational and sales playbooks. Hugh has worked in a variety of roles including interim MD for Network Group and at Datalogic PLC where he developed their global expansion over 17 years to become one of the top companies in its industry. Most recently, Hugh has worked with several cyber security companies with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions opening them to new markets from direct to channel partners generating monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Rishi Bhattacharya is the Founder and CEO of Impact & Influence, an independent communications consultancy designed for the next generation of leaders, companies and organisations. He has 25 years of communications experience, as both an advisor and a journalist. Prior to Impact & Influence, he was a senior executive at two international communications agencies for a total of 15 years, providing both C-suite advisory for companies going through fundraising rounds, as well as running complex communications programmes for some of the world’s largest companies. Before moving into communications, he was a broadcast political journalist during the Blair years.

The new Kalgera advisors join existing advisors:

Ivona Wolff has experience in financial services advisory, commercial, product, pricing and partnership development across both large matrix organisations as well as small start-ups. She has functional expertise in card payments (issuing and acquiring), retail bank benchmarking and loyalty services. Ivona also holds a Masters in Economics from LSE.

Karen Thomas is a BBC-trained journalist, global markets analyst and nuclear technology correspondent. With her background in healthcare, she has also worked overseas in international development supporting resource-poor academic institutions and for humanitarian relief agencies. Karen holds a PhD in Pharmacy and an MA in journalism.

‍

About Kalgera

Kalgera, a London-based RegTech, is the first line of defence for financial institutions who want to actively support its most vulnerable customers. By helping the finance sector identify customer vulnerability through transactional data, Kalgera creates better outcomes for the customer and the financial institution itself.

We are committed to working with banks through several avenues to comply with the FCA's Consumer Duty Act. Kalgera’s state-of-the-art technology uses 11 parallel AI models to pinpoint vulnerability to financial abuse and low financial resilience with greater precision.

You can find our online training, in association with the London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF), here and more information over at our website.