Stephane Lesaffre

Stephane grew up in Hong Kong and started his career in 2004 in investment banking based in Hong Kong and Singapore, including at Credit Suisse. This led him cover a range of corporate clients across Greater China and Southeast Asia, with a focus on the Financial Institutions and Technology sectors.

In 2012, Stephane joined Management Consulting firm Bain & Company in San Francisco, where he advised Fortune 1000 and private equity clients on growth and operations strategy projects. His clients included top-10 global players in Technology, eCommerce, Money Transfers, BioTech and Retail.

In 2016, Stephane dived into start-ups, joining NerdWallet, a leading US personal finance site with 400 employees and over $100 million in revenue. As co-lead for the SEO team, he was responsible for growing the user base to over 140 million annual visitors. He then led the financial data integrations team, owning data partnerships with leading account aggregation APIs (Yodlee, Plaid) and credit reporting services (TransUnion).

Stephane returned to Hong Kong in 2020 to found Finverse and bring the benefits of open financial data to Asia-Pacific.

He holds an MBA from Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) and a BA from Yale University.