#MeetTheTeam with Prakash Desai
Here at MatchMove, our team is dedicated to the mission that everyone, everywhere can Spend. Send. Lend. Driven by this mission, our team comes from all walks of life and backgrounds.
To give you a bit of insight into the Finance team at MatchMove as well as how to break into a FinTech career, we asked Prakash Desai, our Chief Finance Officer, to share his insights.
WIth a career spanning countries and decades, Prakash said he was excited to join MatchMove on the next phase of its journey — from start-up to scale-up and far, far beyond.
Tell us a bit about your background and what you do at MatchMove.
I am a Chartered Accountant with over 25 years of financial and business management experience. I filled various leadership and strategic roles spanning several countries, including Singapore, Australia, and South Africa. Prior to joining MatchMove, I served in several executive roles, including being a Senior Partner at Deloitte where I led the Financial Services Practice for Singapore for a number of years. In addition, I also serve as a non-executive director on several company boards.
Now, I am the Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) based out of Singapore, and oversee the group’s finance function, including governance, risk management, and internal audit. I work closely with the executive team and the board of directors to set the strategic direction of the group — and to ensure we have the right finances to make it happen!
How did you find yourself in the FinTech space and what big opportunities do you see for FinTech in general?
I followed MatchMove’s journey and its pivot to payments and growth as a FinTech through my close personal association and friendship with Shailesh Naik, the founder and Group CEO, and was always intrigued by the speed with which MatchMove was innovating solutions to address financial inclusion and embedded finance in both emerging and developed markets.
I believe, given the relatively high proportion of unbanked and underserved individuals and corporates in the region and beyond, that the opportunities for FinTechs like MatchMove are immense. Given MatchMove’s established presence in well diversified markets and product offerings that are continuously being enhanced, MatchMove is very well positioned to continue to lead the way towards embedded finance.
What’s next for realising the MatchMove dream of putting A Bank in Any App?
As a B2B2X player with an established record in innovating new digitally-native solutions to age-old problems such as financial inclusion, MatchMove’s dream to put ‘A Bank in Any App’ is imminent. With new-to-the-world solutions such as LightSpeed, which can launch your own branded financial app in minutes, this dream is closer than ever.
Can you share some advice for someone who wants to break into FinTech?
At an industry level, I believe that the Fintech space is getting a bit crowded and frankly I foresee consolidation of marginal players. This means that the ability to scale up, both in terms of the value chain as well as the customer base and operations, will be paramount.
Anyone looking to break into FinTech should learn how businesses are run and what makes them profitable. Walking the path to profitability for any growing FinTech in the scale-up phase is an amazing and rewarding journey, and anyone who can help guide business on that path will be in very, very high demand.
What’s an inspirational quote that you live by?
Believe you can and you’re halfway there.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Prakash isn’t all numbers and spreadsheets — he is a global traveller and enjoys spending time with friends and family anywhere and everywhere they are around the world.
