I helped turn a California bank into one of America’s fastest-growing. Now I’m building a company to serve the people that banking has failed

I came of age in finance in investment banking in the U.S. during the boom and bust of dotcom era.

I continued in finance by shifting into private equity, working for a multibillion-dollar fund, and it was a tough time, a really tough time.

I was in London, which in the year 2000 was the new frontier, doing debt-to-equity conversions of high yield bonds for telcos, basically telling founders and shareholders that they now owned 1% of these formerly highly valued companies that they used to own and here was their new option plan and me and my debt owned the rest and also, by the way, I need to fire a third of your employees.

It was rough, and I matured quickly — too quickly, really.

I looked up after three years and I realised that I was 250 pounds and I hadn’t seen my family in longer than I care to admit.

So I did the only thing I could do: I retired.

I moved to Gibraltar/Sotogrande, the de facto British enclave in southern Spain, and I became a resident there.

Although the sunshine that I hadn’t seen in years was lovely, but I got bored very quickly.

It was the early days of digital finance, I met some new friends that were having a similar experience to me and wanted to do something interesting.

We applied for — and got — one of the first E-money licenses ever issued in Europe and passported it to more than 20 countries over a few years.

We were soon offering card services, virtual bank accounts through cards programs, P2P transactions, remittance and convincing paper hungry southern European corporations to stop using cheques and leverage digital banking and card solutions.

We grew and grew fast, and after another four years we sold the company to The Bancorp (TBBK), where I had to move to the northeast US again and I ran Institutional Banking in the snow instead of the sun.

Then a call came in from the West Coast.

There was a small team looking to buy a bank or banks — and one of their investors had recommended me.