Leaders & Founders – Details, episodes & analysis

We’re absolutely thrilled to welcome Conrad Ford to the L&F podcast today — a genuine heavyweight in the UK fintech and banking space. Conrad is Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Allica Bank (⁠www.allica.bank⁠), which has been recognised as the UK’s fastest-growing company by The Sunday Times and as the fastest-growing financial technology firm in UK history by Deloitte. That’s no small feat.

Allica is on a mission to transform the landscape of SME banking — bringing back the kind of expert, relationship-driven service that established businesses deserve, but with the power and scalability of cutting-edge technology.

Before Allica, Conrad was the founder and driving force behind Funding Options, the online business lending marketplace that earned a spot on the Financial Times FT1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Under his leadership, it became one of the UK’s most significant fintech success stories, culminating in its acquisition by neobank Tide.

On top of that, Conrad is a Chartered Management Accountant with a career that began in major banks — giving him a rare mix of boardroom credibility, entrepreneurial grit, and a deep understanding of how technology can reinvent financial services.

In this episode, we welcome Beks Yelland — a seasoned digital product leader with a track record across Financial Services, Health, Energy, Utilities and many more, and founder of the not-for-profit community The Female Product Lead. With a mission to build inclusive spaces in the tech and product world, Beks is inspiring a fast-growing network of women to thrive, share knowledge, and step confidently into leadership.

Host Adam Kinder dives deep with Beks into:

• Balancing motherhood and leadership in the fast-paced tech world

• Breaking into — and excelling in — product as a woman in a male-dominated industry

• The origin and growth of The Female Product Lead community

• Actionable steps everyone can take to empower women to succeed in leadership roles

• What companies need to prioritise in 2025 & 2026 to attract and retain diverse talent

Packed with personal stories, hard-earned lessons, and inspiring strategies, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone who wants to make their mark in product, leadership, or tech.

Learn more about Beks on LinkedIn or discover The Female Product Lead at femaleproductlead.com.

Want to know how to get that promotion you've always wanted?

Ever wondered how some people are able to secure such a better package than you, despite doing the same job?

Do you want to truly understand why you and only you are in control of your destiny?

If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, then this episode if for you!

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Our first episode back in 2025 brings us incredible insight from Jeremy Burns, Technology Advisor, Leader and Author of best-selling 'Earn More, Move Up'.

In 'Earn More, Move Up', Jeremy dispels many misconceptions surrounding the appraisal, promotion and bonus review process. Often viewed as highly stressful and great opportunities, there is of course a correct way to plan for these events to maximise your own earning potential and development.

Throughout his career, he has gained valuable insight on both sides of the fence (Manager <> Team Member), and has created a best-in-class guide for anyone in the professional world (regardless of industry) to ensure you reach your full potential.

We explore and dive into the following super interesting areas:

        •       Misunderstandings about pay raises, bonuses, and promotions:
        •       Why you can’t barter for these in performance reviews.
        •       The importance of a personal brand and connecting with the right people.
        •       Ensuring the right people see the value you create.
        •       The hierarchy of priorities: Customer -> Company -> Team -> Us.

With a technology and leadership career spanning 30 years, Jeremy has worked with some of the UK's most successful technology businesses. Originally starting life in insurance and then marketing, he quickly earned his stripes in the world of investment banking, which led him on his path to technology leadership.

What followed were successful leadership positions at companies such as Contentful, The Times, Clearbank and many others, to name a few.

We are extremely grateful for the time we spent with Jeremy. We took so many learnings from this and thoroughly enjoyed getting to understand his view of the market, the industry and of course, learn how to achieve more in our own business!

We're sure you'll love this one too...

Jo Drake is a highly accomplished technology leader and current CTO at THG, one of the UK’s most recognisable and successful e-commerce businesses. Once an aspiring professional tennis player, Jo was thrown into the world of technology when a career-ending injury changed her direction of travel. But what a change this was, with Jo’s career becoming a huge success that has seen her lead organisations at some of the world’s most successful technology companies, including THG, Betfair, Skyscanner, Wood Mackenzie and BBC.

A huge sports fanatic - F1, football, tennis and horse racing are her go-to’s - Jo takes great inspiration from the intersection between sport and business. She is constantly looking to build the best team possible and make sure her players are in the right position, with the right coaches guiding them. She is very much a people-first leader that strives to develop her teams as best as possible, and loves challenging herself in every role that she does.

In this episode, we get a glimpse behind the curtain at what has led Jo to becoming one of the UK’s most successful female technology leaders and previous CIO #100 winner. We also get the scoop on what THG - who run brands including LOOKFANTASTIC, MyProtein, ESPA and many more - are up to and how she leads this diverse and complex business. We also touch on how she tied the knot in a helicopter in Las Vegas, why Tottenham are both a blessing and a curse and of course, what tips she has for aspiring leaders.

We love Jo, and we know you will too!

Carl is an inspirational leader that is currently guiding the incredible team at Super Payments as CTO. With a rich history of building and leading high-performing teams at businesses such as Beauty Pie, Funding Circle, GfK and a global credit business, it's safe to say that Carl gets leadership and how to build highly efficient teams.

In this episode, we dive deep into what has led Carl to where he is today, as well as the amazing story of Super Payments.

In 2022, Super closed one of Europe's largest ever funding rounds of £22.5M to supercharge their effort to take the payments industry head on. Founded by former Funding Circle Co-Founder Samir Desai, they are backed by leading Investors including Accel Partners, Union Square Ventures and LocalGlobe.

They aim to save merchants and customers Billions of £'s in fees with their simple and easy to use platform, with their universal customer loyalty app opening the door to huge savings for customers, and increased sales for merchants and retailers.

We also discuss how to build high-performing teams, what being a leader genuinely means and of course, anti-patterns and why they should be considered when building engineering squads and technology organisations.

We loved this episode and truly hope you do too!

We can't wait to see what Carl, his awesome team and Super go on to accomplish next!

Phil is a VP Engineering at Google, where throughout a 9-year tenure he's led a number of technical teams, including the Site Reliability Engineering group for Google Cloud Platform and Google's internal Technical Infrastructure. A UK native, Phil holds a BA in Mathematics from Oxford University and before joining Google, he spent 17 years as Chief Architect at Fidessa, where he led teams that designed and built databases and middleware technology for highperformance trading systems. He's passionate about the transformational opportunities created by Cloud computing, has a strong customer focus, and deep expertise in building highly reliable distributed infrastructure at scale.

Phil has some incredible insight into what it takes to scale a company from 50 -> 2,000 people (Fidessa), just what working at Google is like on the west coast and of course, how we can all navigate a turbulent tech landscape in 2023.

We hope you enjoy this one!

Anyfin was launched in 2017 by Mikael Hussain (CEO), Sven Perkmann (CTO) and Filip Polhem (COO), who together bring more than two decades of experience in helping to build some of Sweden’s leading technology success stories at Klarna, Spotify, and iZettle. Their mission is to help as many people as possible to become the best financially stable versions of themselves. Using new technology, they have developed fair, simple and smart services that help their customers get more from their finances, hoping to tackle this underrepresented part of the market. But not only do they want to help you when you are in bad times, they aim to become the financial guardian in your corner that will help you reach healthy financial status and reach your dreams! The Founders quickly saw that many everyday people pay unnecessary high interest fees for part-payments, credit cards and private loans, which is where they started out. Through smart technology and skipping unnecessary middlemen, they quickly found they could offer the lowest possible rate. Jump forward to 2022 and Anyfin have incredible services that help their customers to manage their everyday life and get the most from their financial services, including innovative savings products and many other amazing products coming to the market soon! To date, Anyfin have raised an impressive $101M in funding from investors including Northzone, EQT Group, Accel, Global Founders Capital, FinTech Collective, Quadrille Capital and Augmentum Fintech. They have also raised over $500M in debt capital from a range of undisclosed lenders. With the total of outstanding unsecured consumer credit within Europe standing at a staggering €1,200 Billion, there is a huge market and incredible opportunity to make a genuine difference to millions peoples' lives all over Europe. In this awesome episode we discuss the early days at Anyfin - from listening to impossible to follow audiobooks on the treadmill, not fully understanding good terms sheets to bad ones and everything in between! Yook also gives us his insight into what makes a great Product function and how to prioritise your roadmap and launch products in the market!

Tomas Ohlson is the Founding Engineer at Einride, joining as one of the company’s first 5 employees. Originally from the countryside in Sweden, Tomas grew up on a farm where he was always surrounded by creative minds, passionate about helping those around them. A societal obligation was instilled in him at a young age. Following his passion for engineering, computers and building things, Tomas graduated from university with a Masters in Computer Science and Networks. At University, he met several close and important friends that he would go on to strike amazing relationships with and work alongside in his professional life.

Tomas’ passion for building continued at a fast rate as he co-founded a number of very successful tech businesses in his early professional years and beyond. His quest for building took him from Gothenburg to Silicon Valley and back again, where Tomas now sits as one of Einride’s earliest employees and technical visionaries.

When Tomas, Robert, Linnea, Filip and the Founding team at Einride first started their mission to build an autonomous vehicle capable of replacing traditional driven-trucks, people called them crazy. But, they dared to dream big and have gone on to achieve a huge amount in the company's highly impressive, but short life.

Fast forward to 2021 and Einride are now one of the world’s most advanced and highly anticipated electric and autonomous trucking businesses, with the eyes of the world firmly on their incredible Einride Pod. The Pod is a glimpse into the future - something Tomas says was done deliberately by design - and offers insight into where the world of trucking may be heading with the correct technology and adoption. With incredible new funding behind them, a recent launch in the US and a hugely ambitious roadmap ahead of them, Einride are here to change an industry and improve the future of all of our lives.

The freight industry contributes to both a sad and huge amount of CO2 emissions into our planets' atmosphere. Einride firmly believe that electric and autonomous trucking can have a positively dramatic impact on climate change over the coming years, and are here to lead the way for Europe. They are making their own footsteps in the stand where no one in Europe has gone before them and with this comes both great excitement, but also great expectation.

They are leaders, trailblazers and great people building products that may will become a part of our every day life quicker than you might believe!

To check out Einride, please head to their website: https://www.einride.tech and check out their blog and media channels for more awesome updates on their global expansion! 

Matthew O'Riordan is the CEO & Co-Founder of Realtime Tech company Ably. Ably provides cloud infrastructure and APIs to build realtime features like chat, notifications, live maps, loT control. 

Matt has a very interesting background, coming from South Africa to the UK we hear about his journey. He founded and successfully sold digital consultancy, Econsultancy. We hear about how the idea for Ably came about and how he managed to get the business off the ground right through to successfully achieving funding and growing the business to where it is today.

We get a good insight into Ably and what they do and also what its like going through funding, he also gives some good advice for future founders. 

This is a really great episode and one i really enjoyed.

Jakub Zakrzewski is the Managing Director of APAC at Kraken Digital Exchange, one of the world's most successful and widely used Cryptocurrency exchanges. As MD of APAC, Jakub guides the team on their growth journey in the region and plays a huge part in allowing the business to scale to meet the incredible demand for their product worldwide.

With Cryptocurrency and Blockchain once again being at the forefront of many people's minds in 2021, Kraken are seeing more customer acquisition than ever before and are continuing to add to their world-class team to meet the demands for their amazing product. But asides from their exchange, Kraken also received their US Banking license in 2020 and now plan to offer a range of cutting-edge, unique cryptocurrency banking services to their global population. Some amazing things lie in store for the Kraken!

Jakub's career has been a textbook example of amazing growth, huge success and a whirlwind of a journey that has seen him at the helm of a number of high-growth businesses that have gone through to achieve unicorn status and IPO. After studying Rocket Internet Group as a thesis student, Jakub was offered a job by them in Singapore, which meant up and leaving Europe to find a new life in Asia. It is something that he would do time and time again and is thankful for the incredible opportunities that moving to Singapore has had on his career and his life.

As the first employee of Rocket Internet - Lazada in Singapore, he helped steer them to a $1Bn acquisition by Alibaba Group, which led him on to his next journey as Head of Growth at EasyShip, an award-winning digital logistics business that gained amazing press for their seamless logistics experience.

Then, after being approached by Revolut, he joined as an early employee to help them launch in Singapore. This meant spreading his time between Europe and Singapore and being part of the Revolut rocket which went on to take the world by storm with their well-crafted and hugely popular FX services. After a once in a lifetime experience with Revolut - Jakub joined Kraken as MD APAC in January 2020. It was certainly not that he wanted to ever leave Revolut, but because of his belief to try to see new trends in the market and take amazing opportunities when they arise.

Jakub sees cryptocurrency and decentralised finance playing a huge part of our everyday lives in the coming years and believes in the power of the technology behind how finance could be shaped in the coming years. Jakub wanted to be a part of that revolution and sees Kraken as the perfect place to learn the craft, understand the market and to achieve some marvellous milestones with this high-growth business!