He read the fine print at Citi, became employee number four at a retirement startup, then ran legal for a renter-insurance unicorn. In January 2026 the General Counsel of Raisin US took the corner office. Now he runs the marketplace where restless American savers go hunting for a better rate.
In January 2026, Raisin US needed a new chief executive. Cetin Duransoy was stepping down after nearly three years. The company did not run a marquee search or parachute in a banking veteran. It looked down the hall, at the man who had been quietly running its legal and compliance function since 2023, and handed him the keys. "Alastair is a thoughtful, strategic leader," went the parting note, "and I have full confidence he will guide the company successfully into its next chapter."
That is an unusual arc. The General Counsel chair and the CEO chair sit at the same table, but they rarely swap. Lawyers are trained to find the reasons not to do things. Founders and operators are trained to do them anyway. Alastair Wood spent two decades as the former and somehow kept ending up adjacent to the latter - the legal hire who wanted a seat in the strategy room, not just a signature line on the contract.
Raisin is the Berlin-born fintech that turned a clunky truth into a business. Banks and credit unions are always hungry for deposits. Savers are always annoyed that their cash earns nothing. Raisin sits in the middle, a marketplace that lets an American with a few thousand dollars shop the country for a better rate, and lets a small bank in another state reach that saver without building a branch. Wood now runs the US operation of that machine, an outpost of a company that has pulled in more than $300 million in funding across its life.
He inherits a thesis he clearly believes. Raisin's own 2026 research, which Wood fronts, found that 65% of Americans have switched banks at least once and nearly a third have done it more than once. Loyalty, in other words, is leaking out of the banking system. To a bank, that is a threat. To a deposit marketplace, it is the entire opportunity.
"Consumers are no longer passive in their banking decisions," Wood says. "They are actively evaluating where they store and save their money. Financial institutions that fail to deliver clear-cut value will risk losing customers and deposits to more agile competitors." It is a sentence that doubles as a sales pitch for the thing he sells.
We monitor every dollar as if it belongs to our parents.
Wood did not collect logos at random. Each fintech he joined was wrestling with a different anxiety about money - and each one needed someone who could build guardrails fast without smothering the product.
General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, the fourth person through the door. The problem: the first generation of Americans forced into a do-it-yourself retirement. He built the legal scaffolding for digital wealth, planning and insurance products - and watched his own parents use the result.
VP and General Counsel at the company replacing the cash security deposit with low-cost insurance. The problem: billions of renter dollars locked up in landlords' accounts. Wood ran the legal department through the company's fast-scaling years.
Joined as General Counsel, rose to CEO. The problem: idle savings earning nothing while banks scramble for deposits. Now he is not just keeping the platform legal - he is deciding where it goes next.
Most lawyers who reach Paul Weiss and an in-house perch at Citi stay put. The path is paved, the money is good, the risk is low. Wood walked off it. In 2018 he became the fourth employee at Kindur, a retirement-tech startup only months old.
His reason was not the equity or the foosball table. It was the work itself. He wanted to be somewhere the legal job bled into the business - to sit with "smart, capable people who could move into areas where they could show themselves to be problem solvers." For Wood, compliance was never a back-office chore. It was the thing that let a financial product exist at all.
That conviction shows up in how he talks about regulation. He treats oversight as something to get ahead of, not something to survive. A digital platform handling people's retirement money, he reasoned, needs specialized legal expertise on the inside - not outsourced to a firm that bills by the hour and goes home.
It is a useful instinct for a fintech CEO. The graveyard of financial startups is full of clever products that forgot the rules applied to them. Wood spent twenty years learning exactly where those rules bite. Now he gets to build with that knowledge instead of just warning others about it.
Every day your money spends "in transit" is a day it isn't working for you.
You've got millions of Americans living 10 or more years into later retirements. This is the first generation that has to rely on a do-it-yourself model of retirement.
Americans expect more convenience, better returns, and seamless digital experiences.
Financial institutions that fail to deliver clear-cut value will risk losing customers and deposits to more agile competitors.
When Wood said Kindur watched every dollar "as if it belongs to our parents," it was not a focus-grouped tagline. His retired parents actually used the platform. The line that sounds like marketing was, for him, a literal description of the stakes. It is the kind of grounding that is hard to fake and easy to spot - a leader who has met the person on the other end of the spreadsheet.
Named CEO of Raisin US. Michael A. Blum joins as Executive Chairman, pairing Wood's operating role with a seasoned banking and wealth-management voice.
Fronts Raisin's State of Consumer Banking work, arguing that low loyalty and high inertia now define how Americans bank - and that the savers who do move are the ones to win.
Hosting a public webinar on where savings rates head next and a refreshed Raisin experience, with a stated focus on shrinking the time money sits idle "in transit."