Christer Holloman

Why organisations work with Christer Holloman

• He built the playbook he now teaches. As founder and CEO of Divido, he scaled a white-label Buy Now Pay Later platform to 10 countries and an exit into NatWest, raising roughly $50 million from American Express and Sony along the way.
• His book “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate” is built on named case studies from Bank of America, BBVA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, ING, J.P. Morgan, Lloyds and Santander, not generic frameworks.
• He has been on the bank side as HSBC’s first Entrepreneur in Residence, so he speaks to incumbents from inside their own constraints, not as an outsider throwing stones.
• He works at the live edge of fintech: digital assets, open banking as a commercial play rather than a compliance exercise, and the shift from agentic AI into agentic commerce.
• Swedish by background, London and New York by career, multilingual, and at ease in a boardroom with both a retail CEO and a risk committee.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of Divido (2014-2022); company acquired into NatWest in 2024.
• Author of “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate” (Wiley, 2021).
• Author of “The Social Media MBA” series and “How to Sell Online” (Wiley).
• Entrepreneur in Residence, HSBC (2022-2023).
• Co-founder and CEO of sustainable finance platform Credential.
• MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford.
• Forbes contributor on fintech; former tech writer for Sky News.

Biography

Buy Now Pay Later looked like a retail feature before it looked like an asset class. Divido, the company Christer Holloman founded out of an Oxford MBA thesis in 2014, was one of the first platforms to treat it as infrastructure: a white-label product that banks and lenders could plug into any merchant, in any country, without rebuilding their own stack. By 2022 the business had raised around $50 million from investors including American Express and Sony, operated in 10 markets, and counted Mastercard, BMW and HSBC among its clients. In 2024 it became part of NatWest.

That operator experience is the spine of everything he now teaches. After Divido, HSBC made him their first Entrepreneur in Residence, an unusual role that put a founder inside one of the world’s largest banks to challenge how it builds, buys and partners on new technology. It is also the reporting line behind his Wiley book “Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate”, a collection of case studies drawn from named executives at Bank of America, BBVA, Citi, Deutsche Bank, ING, J.P. Morgan, Lloyds, Santander, Standard Chartered and others. The thesis is unsentimental: incumbents can innovate, but only when the operating model, not the PR team, gets redesigned.

He has since moved to New York, co-founded the sustainable finance platform Credential, and continued to write for Forbes on fintech. Earlier in his career he launched Glassdoor in Europe for Rich Barton and ran digital product at The Times and The Sunday Times, which gives him a media-trained way of explaining complex regulated products to non-specialist audiences.

What senior audiences get is someone who has raised the money, signed the bank partnerships, lived with the compliance questions and then written the book. He is particularly sharp on where AI, digital assets and embedded finance are about to collide inside balance-sheet businesses, and on the specific question of what serious incumbents should do about it.

Key speaking topics

• Fintech and the future of banking
• Open banking as commercial strategy
• Digital assets and tokenisation
• Agentic AI and agentic commerce
• Buy Now Pay Later and embedded finance
• Innovation inside regulated industries
• Scaling a venture from founder to exit

Ideal for

• Bank and insurance executive committees, innovation boards and retail banking leadership
• CDOs, CIOs and heads of innovation in financial services and large regulated enterprises
• Fintech, payments and retail finance conferences
• Corporate venture and M&A teams assessing fintech partnerships or acquisitions

Audience outcomes

• A clear read on how incumbent banks are actually innovating right now, drawn from named case studies rather than consulting templates.
• Practical judgement on when to build, when to partner with a startup, and when to acquire.
• A working view of where open banking, digital assets and agentic commerce are converging into the next retail financial product.
• Founder-level honesty about what it takes to sell into, partner with and exit to a large bank.