I’ve spent my career solving problems others haven’t figured out yet. Started in a physics lab building atomic clocks beyond the quantum limit. Moved to McKinsey advising Tier 1 European banks on payments, regulatory strategy, and digital transformation. Been at Pleo since 2019, scaling the company from 100 to 850+ people while building payment infrastructure across 15+ European markets.

The through-line: I’m drawn to hard problems in complex systems. Quantum mechanics taught me to work with ambiguity. Consulting taught me how to navigate boardrooms and regulatory regimes. Operating taught me how to build customer-centric solutions on top of legacy infrastructure and technical constraints—whether that’s fragmented European payment rails or regulatory complexity across markets.

What I build: Highly scalable, modular systems that turn constraints into competitive advantages. The kind that work in production when nobody’s watching.

Physics → Payments → Platform. Different domains, same muscle: building systems that work when nobody’s solved it before.

Pleo | Aug 2019 - Present

Pleo is a corporate spend management platform — Series C, ~850 employees, operating across 15+ European markets. Joined at ~100 people to get hands-on after years in an advisory role. Scal;ed though hyper growth

Head of Platform, Senior Vice President (Sep 2024 - Present)

  • Led ~70 people across platform engineering, data, AI infrastructure, and regulated entities
  • Achieved 70% reduction in card scheme costs through strategic renegotiation in a duopoly market
  • Drove company-wide AI agenda: internal productivity tooling and infrastructure for future product capabilities
  • Formal accountability to UK financial regulator (EMD license); member of executive committee and risk committee
  • Spun out mature groups teams while maintaining delivery, shrinking scope intentionally as proof the foundation works

As the platform organization matured, the mandate expanded beyond engineering into cross-entity governance. Orchestrated the card scheme cost reduction through craft negotiation with limited leverage in a duopoly, execution is everything. Drove the AI agenda both bottom-up (internal tooling that changed how teams work) and top-down (infrastructure for product capabilities that haven’t shipped yet).

Taking on regulatory accountability changed how I think about scale. When you’re answerable to a regulator, “move fast and break things” isn’t a tradeoff—it’s a failure mode. The goal isn’t to own everything; it’s to build organizations that work without you.

Head of Platform, Vice President (Aug 2023 - Sep 2024)

  • Led 100+ people across payments, data analytics, developer experience, core infrastructure, security, and TechOps
  • Part of the transformation that delivered 300% increase in engineering throughput with flat headcount
  • Hired VP Data; rebuilt underperforming organizations into predictable delivery engines
  • Built the platform systems that product teams depend on to ship fast
  • Ongoing engagement and support “outside of role” on orgnizational design, operating models etc
  • Delivered 3x thoughput increase in the engineering function

Expanded scope beyond payments when clear leadership gaps across data and core engineering were slowing the company down. Partnered with CTO and VP Engineering to rebuild these organizations from the ground up.

The unlock wasn’t adding people—it was removing friction. Platform teams fail when they optimize for optionality. They succeed when they own products with clear users and outcomes. Spinning out a VP Data hire isn’t losing scope—it’s proof the foundation works.

Head of Payments, Vice President (Jun 2021 - Aug 2023)

  • Built Pleo’s payments organization from scratch with ~25 people across engineering, partnerships, compliance, and operations
  • Scaled from 5 to 15 markets in 11 months
  • Restructured partnerships with JPMorgan, BankingCircle, and Yapily to support multi-market expansion
  • Shifted engineering from end-to-end features to modular platform architecture

Turned payment infrastructure into a competitive moat. Navigated regulatory complexity across Europe—different rails, different rules, different customer expectations. Unlocked new product capabilities like invoice payments by building with compliance and regulatory constraints as architecture, not afterthoughts.

Built the systems that let Pleo issue cards, move money in real-time, and handle settlement across fragmented European payment infrastructure. Speed went up. Stability went up. The team could ship payment capabilities without rebuilding the entire stack every time.

You can’t debug in production when you’re moving real money. Modularity isn’t elegance—it’s survival. The companies that win in European FinTech are the ones who build for fragmentation, not against it.

Head of Business Development, Director (Jan 2021 - Jun 2021)

  • Built the business case and initial operating model for Pleo’s standalone payments organization
  • Key member of our Series C round
  • Three team members from this period later became directors

Pleo’s payment infrastructure was scattered across teams. No one owned the full stack. Spent six months proving payments needed to be its own organization—and that we could operate it. Six months later, we got the mandate.

Entrepreneur in Residence (Aug 2019 - Jan 2021)

  • Migrated 20,000+ corporate customers to a new payment processor; unlocked 20 percentage point margin uplift
  • Led a cross-functional team of 15 through PSD2 compliance on a compressed timeline
  • Increased book size per representative by 2–3x by building systems that scaled without adding headcount

First operator role after five years advising. Moving money in production is different than modeling it in PowerPoint. Scaling means working across business functions—payments, product, ops, compliance—and building systems that work when you’re not in the room.

McKinsey & Company | Jan 2014 - Aug 2019

Five years advising European financial institutions. Learned how banking works, what regulators care about, and why most transformations fail. Decided I wanted to build, not advise.

Engagement Manager (~2017 - Aug 2019)

  • Led the founding of a pan-European payment infrastructure company across 5+ jurisdictions — board composition, regulator strategy, vendor selection, executive hiring
  • Built AML transformation programs and payment product roadmaps for Tier 1 banks across the Nordics and Western Europe
  • 3 of 7 payment concepts ideated for a Tier 1 bank became real products in the following years
  • Presented directly to bank CEOs and supervisory boards across multiple countries

Education

PhD in Physics | University of Copenhagen | 2014

Built atomic clocks beyond the quantum limit and foundational components for quantum computing networks. The kind of problems where there’s no textbook answer because nobody’s solved them before.

Physics teaches you to work with ambiguity. You’re navigating fundamental uncertainty—designing experiments, interpreting contradictory data, building frameworks when none exist.

That’s also what building teams and scaling businesses feels like. Different domain, same muscle.

M.Sc in Physics | University of Copenhagen | 2011

B.Sc in Physics | University of Copenhagen | 2009