Nazir Zubairi
Podcast appearances as guest
Episode 10 - Nazir Zubairi
In this episode I sit down with Nazir Zubairi, CEO of the LHoFT Foundation, a Public/Private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalisation for Luxembourg's financial services industry.
On the podcast
"Disruption" is a negative word; financial technology is evolution, and collaboration between banks and startups will keep increasing.
Nazir runs the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT) and deliberately avoided "fintech" in its name.
Nazir has lived and worked in nine countries and spent about 27 years in finance and financial technology.
EBS, the interbank foreign exchange trading system, processed about $220 billion and 130,000 trades a day.
EBS had about 180 people and roughly $600 million in annual revenue and was sold in 2006 for $659 million.
At RBS Nazir set up a high-frequency foreign exchange desk staffed with astrophysicists, which became the largest FX trading desk globally.
SMEs pay eight to ten pips on foreign exchange where large corporates pay about half a pip, and banks charge 16% or more for invoice finance.
Nazir founded EuroTRX, a trade-receivables exchange, around 2011 and sold it after about 18 months to a Dutch government subsidiary.
Nazir was director of product marketing at Currencycloud, then joined Finleap in Berlin, where Solaris was his business case; about 12 companies were launched in 18 months.
Nazir defined Luxembourg's fintech strategy for Luxembourg for Finance before being asked to run the LHoFT.