Xavier De Pauw is a fixed income capital markets & structured finance banker turned challenger bank co-founder & CEO with a demonstrable track record in building successful digital banking and wealth management platforms.
Full-time focus: Founder & co-CEO of kennek, a SaaS Enabled Marketplace for alternative credit.
Other current activities: advisor & NED to selected fintechs.
Previously:
During 10 years at Merrill Lynch in London, Xavier De Pauw evolved from research analyst to structured finance banker and eventually was responsible for the financing of three UK mortgage lending companies acquired by their team.
In 2009, he set out to co-build challenger bank MeDirect from scratch with a strong management team and financial backing from private equity sponsor AnaCap. Over 9 years, they developed a banking group active in 3 European countries, with 300 staff and a €2.5 billion balance sheet.
In 2013, he co-founded MeDirect Bank Belgium, an innovative digital challenger bank and B2C wealth management platform, and assumed the role of CEO of the bank. He developed and executed the Digital Strategy for the bank which resulted in on-boarding 32,000 retail clients who trusted them with €1.5 billion in deposits and AuM/AuC. MeDirect obtained a full Belgian banking licence in 2015 and was supervised by the ECB, BNB, and FSMA. On the balance sheet, they built a treasury book, a €1.5 billion corporate credit book, and a €2 billion Dutch mortgage book.
In 2016, Xavier De Pauw co-founded Fintech Belgium with fellow FinTech entrepreneurs and assumed the role of president of the association. This not-for-profit entity aims to promote FinTech locally and across Europe and facilitates co-creation and networking between FinTechs and incumbents.
In September 2018, Xavier De Pauw joined Degroof Petercam as Group Head of Strategic Innovation & Marketing. He built out and re-organized the Strategic Innovation, Digital, and Marketing teams to better serve their clients and stakeholders. During his short time in this role, they accomplished a number of successes including: they launched a B2C digital advice platform, they articulated strategies and concrete solutions for improved Client Lifecycle Management, they devised a CRM strategy, they developed a plan for B2C & B2B2C digital distribution channels for their asset manager DPAM, and they laid the foundations for digital marketing. They also launched a number of POCs with fintechs as part of the innovation acceleration. Importantly, they impacted the culture positively and illustrated through a number of concrete deliveries the potential positive impact from innovation.
