real-time-payments
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Brad Goodall Spent Eight Years Making the Card Optional
An Australian founder went to London, learned the plumbing of modern finance, and built a checkout alternative with banks instead of against them. After Banked’s acquisition by NAB, his most useful lesson is less about the exit than the patience required to change how money moves.
Prajit Nanu
Prajit Nanu is the co-founder and CEO of Nium, the Singapore-born fintech unicorn that has quietly become the plumbing behind global money movement for banks, airlines, and digital platforms. Starting with a frustrating attempt to wire INR 40,000 for a friend's bachelor party in Phuket, he built what is now a $1.4 billion payments infrastructure company processing over $8 billion annually across 190+ countries in 100 currencies. A commerce graduate from Mumbai with a sales background rather than a fintech pedigree, Nanu turned that outsider status into competitive advantage - building what incumbents told him was impossible.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Darragh Buckley
Darragh Buckley is the founder and CEO of Increase, an enterprise-grade banking API company that lets technology businesses programmatically store, move, and reconcile money by connecting directly into the Federal Reserve's payment rails. He was Stripe's first employee, joining the Collison brothers - fellow natives of Limerick, Ireland - in 2010 to build the banking and money-movement foundations of the company. After leaving Stripe in 2016, he founded Increase (YC Summer 2020), which now processes well over $100 billion a year with a famously tiny team. A contrarian who believes in the staying power of community banks, he has personally acquired stakes in small Washington-state banks, including a 10%-plus position in Twin City Bank that triggered Federal Reserve disclosure.
Dylan Massey
Dylan Massey is the co-founder and CEO of Interchecks, a New York-based instant-payment platform that moves deposits and withdrawals for sportsbooks, lenders, fintechs and banks. A former Goldman Sachs analyst and University of Chicago economics grad, he started the company in 2016 and has built it into infrastructure that has processed more than $50 billion, powering money movement for names like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Credit Karma Money. In 2022 Interchecks raised a $16M Series B co-led by Senator Investment Group and Standard Investments.
Eric Solis
Eric Solis is the founder and CEO of MovoCash, Inc., a fintech company building on-demand mobile banking for the underbanked. A self-described full-stack entrepreneur with more than 25 years in finance, he was a senior investments executive at Merrill Lynch and Prudential Securities before launching SaveDaily and SAVE252. At MovoCash he developed MOVO, a patented platform that blends on-demand banking, distributed-ledger technology and AI to issue Real Time Payment Cards and move digital cash peer-to-peer. The company raised roughly $9 million across a 2016 seed and a 2018 Series A, partnered with Mastercard and FDIC-insured banks, and grew past 250,000 users.