Fintech: Boom or Bubble?

Paulina spent the last 12 years in various C-suite roles at Travelstart from CTO to CMO, to CCO and Managing Director. During Covid while reassessing opportunities on the table for the travel industry, Paulina founded GlydePay – a spin off from the Travelstart group focusing on solving the many inherent payment problems in the travel industry and beyond in partnership with Mastercard and Access bank.

With over 20 years of experience in the financial market, Bernard is a strategist dedicated to transforming concepts into execution. Recognizing the needs of the underbanked and unbanked populations in Africa, Paytec's mission is to free money and liberate prosperity. Through the creation of real-world solutions, we aim to improve the lives of those using our services, especially reaching out to these underserved communities, fostering a brighter and more inclusive financial future for all.

Patrick brings over 15+ years of business and technology, strategy expertise combined with a personal passion for building and scaling companies.

Today he serves as Co-Founder at Happy Pay. Happy Pay is building a responsible Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform to drive financial inclusion in South Africa and across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Patrick also provides his strategic fintech, payments, banking and startup operational expertise to Bolster. (YCS21).

Previously, Patrick held various roles executive roles including SVP of Strategic Initiatives at FISPAN, Director of Strategic Initiatives within PayPal’s Omni Payments group and Director of GTM Platforms/E-commerce. In these roles, he supported senior leaders in driving forward PayPal’s transformational and strategic initiatives across various product lines and business units.

He was the Co-Founder and served as RentMoola’s CEO building the company from the ground level to a payments business that today is a high growth and innovate fintech company in the rent and utility payment vertical processing payments across North America.

Patrick’s vision was to build an innovate payments company within a payment vertical that had not seen any innovation in decades. Rent. RentMoola was a pioneer in developing the emerging rent payment vertical with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and BMO Bank of Montreal along with industry enterprise platform partners.

Patrick’s story in building RentMoola has been published in Fintech Founders: Inspiring Tales from the Entrepreneurs that are Changing Finance - it is a collection that includes some of the most successful fintech entrepreneurs that help the word understand the challenges and opportunities of applying technology and collaboration to solve some key problems of the financial services industry.

Muhammad Nana is the Vice President, Fintech Partnerships for the Eastern Europe Middle East, and Africa region. In this role, he is responsible for formulating and executing Mastercard’s strategic intent with Fintech’s and managing a team who holds key relationships with these partners across the region. These Fintech partners include

Enablers, Paytech’s, Neobanks, Payment Service Providers, eWallets etc.

Muhammad has over 19 years of experience in sales, marketing and operations holding leadership positions within the Financial Services industry within Banks and Fintech’s.

Muhammad joined Mastercard in 2016 and has held varied roles in the organization managing multiple product lines across several geographies and regional clients. Prior to

taking up his current role, he worked within the Digital Partnerships business focusing on Telco engagements responsible for driving business development activities for non- traditional payment solutions and partnerships with a focus on financial inclusion and the growth of digital payments.

Muhammad’s career in financial services began at Standard Bank in 2004 in back-office operations, leading operations activities across the sixteen African countries for the group. Right before joining Mastercard, he was responsible for the growth & operations of secure mobile remote payment authentication at MTN MobileMoney Holdings.