Matteo Rizzi is the Investment Director of the BLOC Smart Africa fund, where he focuses on Tech4Impact investments in Africa and advises Bamboo’s other funds on financial technology investments.
Matteo is an unconventional investor, entrepreneur and thought leader with two decades of experience in financial technologies. For three years in a row (2014-2016), Financial News has nominated Matteo as one of the “40 most in influential FinTech executives in Europe”.In 2008 he co-founded Innotribe, the innovation arm of SWIFT, where Matteo worked for 13 years. He also launched the Innotribe Startup Challenge, the first global FinTech deal ow of its kind. He left SWIFT in 2013 when he co-founded and became a partner at SBT Venture Capital, one of the first funds solely dedicated to early-stage FinTech investments, with USD 100 million under management, building a portfolio of a dozen startups including eToro (worth USD 2.6 billion today) and Mobeewave (acquired by Apple).
Since 2015, after selling his interest in SBT Venture Capital, Matteo Rizzi took venture partner positions at Omidyar Network, Société General Ventures, Bamboo Capital Partners and NEVA FinVentures, where he was involved in investments in companies like Flutterwave in Lagos. He also created and co-founded FinTechStage (now FTS Group), a platform for investors, innovators, and start-ups to foster FinTech disruption globally, which carried out some 50+ missions and events all over the world and throughout Africa. As a byproduct of Fintechstage, Matteo founded Timepledge, a global program helping African entrepreneurs in several domains of their businesses, from product to strategy to channel management to investors pitching.
He is the author or “The FinTech Revolution” (EGEAN, 2016, ITA) and of “Talent & Rebels, dealing with corporate misfits” (HOEPLI, 2019, ENG, and ITA). Recently,
Matteo Rizzi took the position of Executive Producer of Breaking Banks Europe (a spin-o of Breaking Banks US) available on Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify, GooglePlay and YouTube.
Matteo speaks five languages, holds a University degree in Computer Science (University of Genova) and a Postgraduate in Financial Transactions (Solvay Business School).
How an unconventional approach to innovation can save your business from disruption.
Idea Management, Talent, Integration with your day-to-day business, and company culture are all parts of a recipe where incremental innovation is one of the outcomes, yet often not complement by a more fundamental and disruptive approach to apprehend the unknown, the unexpected, and the future.
What’s in it for you?
Get inspired by a perspective on innovation you might not have thought about.
Technology with a purpose, sustainability, financial inclusion, and impact investing are becoming key factors in the way we do business, regardless of the part of the world we are looking at.
What can we learn from the evolution of the emerging markets in terms of technology adoption, financial literacy and entrepreneurship culture?
What’s in it for you?
Understand the dynamics of emerging markets and how to apply some of the lessons learned into your business, witnessing amazing stories of resilience and tech enablement
The world digital leapfrog, the challenge of reinvention, dealing with uncertainty. All at the same time.
Most of the business is facing an unprecedented market disruption, and no one can predict the speed of its recovery. Resilient businesses will survive, anti-fragile ones with thrive.
What’s in it for you?
Through groundbreaking stories of successful and failed business reinventions, find your own source of strength, as a company, to move forward.
Let’s advance the dialogue and make progress from the Financial Inclusion angle. How the underbanked and the unbanked became the biggest opportunity for incumbents and FinTechs to tap on.
If you hire the same talents, you will end up in places where someone else has been before. Rebels and Innovators are often misguided, isolated and pushed away by large organizations. Matteo has been an Intrapreneur and an Innovator for the past two decades, and love to share his view on how to deal with misfits in your organisation.
Investing in Fintech startups and advising organisations on how to best deal with startups, creating the right collaboration environment.
Often, executives of large organisations want to have a snapshot of the market, investment, and tech trends within the banking and insurance market. Having kept an investor hat for the past seven years, Matteo has first-eye insights constantly in the financial services marketplace.
Building strong financial eco-systems is key in every society. Matteo believes that the ingredients for a healthy and productive Fintech Ecosystem are: government policies, startups community catalyzed, capital, and talent.
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