HSBC quietly hired from Revolut, Monzo & Wise for new fintech rival

HSBC are back with a new fintech project looking to compete with the likes of Revolut and Wise. Zing, its new money transfer service, has been in the works for some time now and has been bringing together HSBC veterans, and new faces from the fintech scene, including from Zing’s main competitors. Lots of Zing’s new faces have come from fintech unicorns. Monzo’s director of product marketing Neil McKeown joined as its head of product and brand marketing. From Revolut, Dario De Angelis joined as a senior treasury manager. On the engineering front it hired Eduardo Mercer who spent a decade working at Wise. This isn’t HSBC’s first foray into fintech; it invested $35m into neobank Monese, which isn’t doing too well at the moment. The investment bank has been shifting a number of senior people from that project into their shiny new one. These include head of mobile Dimitri Bogatenkov, senior product designer Gandhali Mane, and senior engineer Eigen Lenk. When it comes to Zing’s most senior staff however, HSBC have kept things in-house. CFO Ian Fullen was HSBC’s head of costs and investments for retail banking and wealth management. CEO James Allan was head of FX and payments for wealth and personal banking. Head of technology Nassos Economopoulos was most recently global head of cloud and emerging technologies risk.