Monese makes senior hires from Revolut and JP Morgan for BaaS push

Monese has appointed Atul Choudrie as managing director of its push into banking-as-a-service (BaaS).

Choudrie joined Monese in 2019 and made chief commercial officer in 2020 to help it establish its cloud-based transactional BaaS platform, which launched last month, and Monese’s strategic partnership with Investec and other partnerships, including PayPal, Mastercard and Avios. 

He will now be responsible for its growth as the banking challenger looks to diversify its revenue streams into the B2B sphere following others such as Starling Bank. He was previously CCO at Ditto Bank and is also an advisor to a number of Blockchain start-ups. Choudrie will also continue as CCO at Monese.

In addition, Steve Tryner to CFO and Stephen Chang to VP Operations at Monese. The pair, who are formerly of Revolut and JP Morgan, respectively, will bolster Monese senior leadership team just months after the first close of Monese’s (ongoing) $162m Series C.

Tryner has 30 years of experience in finance and change management roles across financial services, including investment management, banking and insurance, and more recently in tech-enabled businesses. He was formerly CFO at Revolut as well as the payments company, Allpay. He has held roles at Deutsche Asset Management, AXA Investment Management, ABN-AMRO and Alpha Bank. 

Chang has over 30 years experience in technology and financial services. He joins Monese from JP Morgan, where he has worked for over 10 years in payments and transactional banking, in global roles. He has held senior roles at Visa, Mastercard, Amazon and IBM and worked extensively in Asia, the US and Europe. Stephen is tasked with growing the Operations teams for Monese and helping support the business in its next stage of growth. 

Atul Chourdrie, Managing Director of BaaS and CCO at Monese, said. Our BaaS proposition is unique within the market - being configurable and completely end to end. I believe we can help others take their digital banking offering to a totally new level, get them to market as quickly as possible and get them ahead of consumer demand. There are some very exciting times ahead for us.”

Norris Koppel, Founder and CEO of Monese, says: “[Atul’s] leadership will help push our BaaS platform forward and ensure it goes from strength-to-strength. Steve and Stephen come with stellar track records and huge experience in both modern high growth and more traditional, global financial services companies. These appointments build on the progress we have made and will help push us forward during our next phase of growth.”