Derren Powell

Founder, Finterra · Payments & Fintech Specialist

Derren Powell is a payments and fintech specialist with more than 25 years in financial services, spanning retail banking, card issuing, merchant acquiring, the card schemes and the fintechs built on them.

He spent over seven years at Mastercard, most recently as Vice President, Business Development – Merchants, having previously led fintech business development for UK & Ireland. In those roles he acted as the bridge between new entrants to the payments ecosystem and the network, helping challenger banks, prepaid providers and e-money institutions bring card propositions to market.

Before Mastercard, Derren was at Transact Payments, a European e-money institution and Visa and Mastercard principal member providing BIN sponsorship across 23 countries, giving him hands-on card issuing experience from the regulated-EMI side. His earlier career was in banking: three years at Citi and more than a decade at HSBC, including Head of Sales for HSBC in Qatar. Across his career he has delivered more than 50 card and payment programmes on both the issuer and acquirer side of the Visa and Mastercard schemes.

He is a longstanding advocate for financial inclusion, and founded Finterra to offer the kind of senior, independent counsel that usually sits inside the networks: for the industry, from the industry.