27
Derek White
Chief Design and Digital Officer
Barclays
Entrepreneurship came naturally to Derek White. At age nine he started a newspaper distribution business with his brother, when their father was out of work. While attending Utah State University in the mid-1990s, White formed an events marketing company that had credit card bank First USA as a client, and that became his entrée into financial services and, ultimately, online finance. Impressed with White’s proficiency at attracting account applications, First USA — subsequently acquired by Bank One Corp. and in turn by JPMorgan Chase & Co. — hired him to start a sports and entertainment division. In 2000, after working with First USA’s Wingspan, touted as the world’s first Internet bank, White went to work with the founders of Juniper Bank, moving to Barclays when the U.K. giant acquired the online upstart in 2005. For London-based Barclays, White spearheaded an emerging-markets expansion strategy in 15 countries, and in 2011 he became chief customer experience officer, launching the Pingit mobile platform. With an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, White, 42, has been Barclays’ chief digital and design officer since 2013, and he has laid out a welcome mat to fintech start-ups. “We asked what we could provide beyond financial and human capital — and it was customers,” he says. “Start-ups’ hardest nut to crack is customers.” Barclays has partnered with the Techstars accelerator in London to “create collisions between brilliant people and the right kind of environment for innovation.” They held their first demo day in London a year ago and one in New York last month, where applications ranged from quantum computing to bond trading to blockchain. Says White, “We’re taking the growth opportunities that we have, the new technology we see, and going out to start-ups asking how they could help us create the future of financial services.”
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35
1. James Robinson III 2. Jane Gladstone 3. Matthew Harris 4. Steven McLaughlin 5. Jonathan Korngold |
6. Richard Garman & 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park 8. Thomas Jessop 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka 10. Hans Morris |
11. Maria Gotsch 12. Marc Andreessen 13. Barry Silbert 14. Jay Reinemann 15. Mariano Belinky |
16. François Robinet 17. Vanessa Colella 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena 20. Rodger Voorhies |
21. Michael Schlein 22. Kenneth Marlin 23. Rumi Morales 24. Mark Beeston 25. Vladislav Solodkiy |
26. Fabian Vandenreydt 27. Derek White 28. Alex Batlin 29. Jeffrey Greenberg 30. P. Howard Edelstein |
31. Nektarios Liolios 32. Roy Bahat 33. Andrew McCormack 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer 35. Janos Barberis |
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