In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, staying ahead means staying informed. As innovation accelerates and new challenges reshape the banktech and fintech sectors, understanding what’s driving change has never been more important. “Inside the ISX Leadership”, is a video interview series dedicated to providing key insights and values that define who ISX Financial are as leaders in the banktech space.
Our first episode features an insightful conversation with Ajay Treon, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director, who shares perspectives on growth, strategy and the forces redefining financial services today.
Watch the full episode or read the full interview below.
What does it take for a CFO to be a successful strategic leader in this fast-evolving industry?
I would say ISX Financial is a regulated banktech innovator bringing transactional banking as well as instant payment solutions to our customers. We're a licensed EMI with direct connectivity to SEPA as well as UK payment systems. We offer several offerings and I'll go by brand: PaidBy® is our account-to-account checkout and instant settlement solution, ISXMoney® is a multi IBAN, multi-currency IBAN offering, Masspay is our solution to global payouts, flykk® is our retail product and Probanx® is our technology solution, where we offer CorePlus, our core banking offering and CoreConnect, which is our technical connections to the payment systems.
As CFO, I'll say that my main responsibilities focuses on ensuring sustainable growth, a balanced approach between profit and growth. I ensure capital and liquidity resilience and I am responsible for allocating investments, whether it be in our technology or in our talent.
What key topics and challenges is the banking and fintech industry focusing on right now?
It's a great question and there are several topics that I keep front of mind. So the first one is that the payments industry is very competitive. So margin compression is a key focus for me and you have to balance that with ensuring that you are delivering customer solutions which are cost effective and also value accretive to the customer. I think regulation and resilience is really important at the moment. So we have seen the evolution of the Payment Services Directive (PSD) and that opened up a lot for PSD2, and PSD3 will open up even more. We need to be there to capture that. Now, the resilience side of it, comes from operational resilience. Earlier this year, we saw the rollout of DORA and then finally you've got also fraud on the whole authorised push payment, also known as APP fraud, which is a key focus of ours. I would also say that digital transformation is important. So it was great to see the growth in account-to-account or open banking. We were very fortunate that we picked up on this very early, late 2021-2022 and started to scale our offerings. I recently went to a Open Banking conference in the UK and it was great to see not only year on over year the exponential growth that it had, but also the innovations that are going to follow.
So open finance and embedded payments are being a big discussion this year. AI and Cyber are also hot topics and I believe AI is something we should embrace. Whilst there are many use cases out there in the form of agentic AI, chat bots and these sort of things, for us it's primarily going to be to support our KYC and fraud detection.
And finally, talent and the shortage of talent. So talent for us is everything. You know, as a high growth company scaling at pace, we're always looking for talent and the scarcity means that not only do you have to focus on procurement, but also retention in the form of learning and development.
How is ISX Financial addressing these industry challenges and staying ahead?
I'd start off by saying that ISX believes in building its own tech, to take away dependencies on third parties. So as builders, we ensure that we're able to deliver to our customers at pace, and really focus on innovative products while bringing them to the market on a timely manner.
I really think that, as mentioned earlier, instant and open banking is seeing phenomenal growth and as an early adopter back in late 2021, we're looking to capture a good market share there. Given the fact that we build our own technology, we focus on making sure that we are regulatory compliant by design. We need to embrace AI as there are plenty of uses out there. But, we also see a lot of opportunity and potentially developing a competitive advantage compared to our competitors, in the KYC and fraud detection part. We put the customer at the heart of the business in everything we do. So we listen to our customers and key things that they are really keen on, is fast onboarding, API integrations and transparent costing.
And finally, our customers consistently tell us that they want global reach. To deliver on that, our direct connectivity to Europe and the UK, combined with SWIFT access and the ability to reach 150 countries through our global payout solution, puts us in a strong position to meet that demand.
On talent, we offer a multi-jurisdictional location footprint and this enables us to attract talent where needed. Plus we focus on investing in learning and development for all of our staff.
Looking ahead, how do you see these developments shaping the future, and what trends do you anticipate?
From my perspective, I think real-time finance is going to become a default payment option for everyone. I think the fact that you can make payments instantly 24/7/365, there will be a use case where you'll get interoperability across these instant payment rails, which would mean that you can even cross FX across the globe at any time during the day. We've also got emerging payment options. So a lot of discussion around Central Bank digital coins and stablecoins. I think this is something that we need to keep on the radar to ensure that we as an alternative payment methods provider, we watch that space and if need be and if there's a use case and a customer need, embrace that. You've also got the regulatory evolution, like PSD3.
So, I really honestly think that globally, there will be harmonisation from a regulatory standpoint and embrace that to be honest with you. And then I guess as far as the CFO role is concerned, I think you'll see a transformation to us becoming technology enabled, data-driven, savvy decision makers.
Good examples would be we will be using data to provide the insight to make faster decisions around investments, risk management and compliance as well as transformation within an organisation.
What does it take for a CFO to be a successful strategic leader in this fast-evolving industry?
I would start by saying that it's important to be a visionary. So one of your core roles is to basically be a consigliere to the CEO and stand shoulder to shoulder with them. But you must have discipline - discipline in ensuring that you're very clear with your strategic outcomes, and in course-correcting quickly when things aren’t heading in the right direction or according to plan. And then finally be disciplined in capital allocation. I'd also say that it's important to embrace technology. As mentioned above, AI is important because you need rapid access to data in order to generate insights and take action. I’d also highlight the importance of governance. Everyone should embrace compliance and regulation, and these should sit at the heart of the business alongside the customer. Talent is another critical factor. I’ve mentioned it twice because acquiring the right talent truly matters: building the right culture, fostering cross-cultural collaboration, and having cross-border talent all help ensure that we can genuinely connect with our customers.
And then finally, stakeholder communication is important. I started off by saying it's important to be clear with your strategic vision. However, you also need to communicate clearly with all of your stakeholders, whether that be the customer, whether that be shareholders, whether that be your employees.