Samir Desai

Samir is a fintech entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Super Payments, a payments start-up aiming to disrupt the industry behemoths Visa and MasterCard. Samir built his reputation as co-founder and CEO of Funding Circle, the small business lender which started as a peer-to-peer lender and has morphed into the largest SME lending platform now funded by institutions, governments and individuals. From 2010 to the end of 2021, Samir oversaw Funding Circle’s rapid growth in the UK and USA, providing £14.5bn worth of loans to over 130,000 small businesses. He also led the company’s Initial Public Offering in 2018 raising £300m. Although he has stepped down from the helm, he remains a Non-Executive Director and retains his shareholding. In 2016 Samir’s pioneering work at Funding Circle was recognised with the award of the CBE. His new venture, Super Payments, has raised £22.5m and is offering free payments to businesses when they use the service to sell via their own websites. Super makes money via its own platform, a mobile app collating offers from client businesses to drive sales to them, taking a commission only from these sales. Prior to founding Funding Circle, Samir was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an investment executive at Olivant focused on financial services businesses.