About Xavier De Pauw

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, I evolved from research analyst to structured finance banker and eventually was responsable for the financing of three UK mortgage lending companies acquired by our team.

In 2009, I 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 we developed a banking group active in 3 European countries, with 300 staff and a €2.5bln balance sheet.

In 2013, I co-founded MeDirect Bank Belgium, an innovative digital challenger bank and B2C wealth management platform, and assumed the role of CEO of the bank. I developed and executed the Digital Strategy for the bank which resulted in on-boarding 32,000 retail clients who trusted us with € 1.5 bln 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, we built a treasury book, a €1.5bln corporate credit book and a €2bln dutch mortgage book.

In 2016 I 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 Sept 2018 I joined Degroof Petercam as Group Head of Strategic Innovation & Marketing. I built out and re-organised the Strategic Innovation, Digital and Marketing teams to better serve our clients and stakeholders.
During my short time in this role we accomplished a number of successes including: we launched a B2C digital advice platform, we articulated strategies and concrete solutions for improved Client Lifecycle Management, we devised a CRM strategy, we developed a plan for B2C & B2B2C digital distribution channels for our asset manager DPAM and we laid the foundations for digital marketing.
We also launched a number of POCs with fintechs as part of the innovation acceleration.
Importantly we impacted the culture positively and illustrated through a number of concrete deliveries the potential positive impact from innovation.