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

Joined at ~100 people to get hands-on after years in an advisory role. Drawn to Pleo for the growth, the learning, and a company without unnecessary layers of management.

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

Same role, broader mandate. As the platform organization matured, took on increased responsibilities across the company and into our regulated entities.

Orchestrated 70% reduction in card scheme costs through strategic renegotiation in a duopoly market. The kind of negotiation that requires craft at the highest level—when you have limited leverage, execution is everything.

Spun out teams as they matured, bringing the organization from 100+ to ~70 people while maintaining delivery. Drove company-wide AI agenda—both grassroots movement on internal tooling and infrastructure for future product capabilities.

Took on formal responsibilities in Pleo’s UK financial services entity: accountable to regulators (EMD license), member of executive committee and risk committee. Increased role in board orchestration and cross-entity coordination.

What operating at scale teaches you: Building is one thing. Spinning out is another. The goal isn’t to own everything—it’s to build organizations that work without you. And when you’re accountable to regulators, there’s no such thing as “move fast and break things.”

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

Expanded scope beyond payments. Clear leadership gaps across data and core engineering teams were slowing the company down. Partnered with CTO and VP Engineering to rebuild these organizations.

Led 100+ people across payments, data analytics, developer experience, core product infrastructure, security, and TechOps. Took underperforming areas and turned them into predictable delivery engines. Hired new VP Data and established foundational capabilities. Built the platform systems that product teams depend on to ship fast.

Part of the transformation that delivered 300% increase in engineering throughput with the same headcount. The unlock wasn’t adding people—it was removing friction.

What I learned: Platform teams fail when they optimize for optionality. They succeed when they own products with clear users and outcomes. Spinning out leaders (like VP Data) 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 the ground up. Led ~25 people across engineering, partnerships, compliance, and operations. Turned payment infrastructure into a competitive moat.

Restructured partnerships with JPMorgan, BankingCircle, and Yapily to support multi-market expansion. Built the foundation that enabled Pleo to scale from 5 to 15 markets in 11 months. 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.

Shifted engineering from end-to-end features to modular platform architecture. 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.

What scaling payments taught me: You can’t debug in production when you’re moving real money. Modularity isn’t elegance—it’s survival. Compliance is infrastructure. And 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)

Pleo’s payment infrastructure was scattered across teams. No one owned the full stack. I spent six months building the business case for why payments needed to be a standalone organization—and proving we could operate it.

Built the initial team and operating model. Defined what a payments org at scale would look like: engineering, partnerships, compliance, and operations under one roof. Hired the foundation of what became Pleo’s corporate development team. Served as key member of our Series C round.

Three team members from this period later became directors. The goal was to make payments infrastructure a competitive moat, not a cost center. Six months later, we got the mandate.

Entrepreneur in Residence (Aug 2019 - Jan 2021)

Joined Pleo at ~100 people. Wanted to get my hands dirty after five years advising. First operator role.

Migrated 20,000+ corporate customers to a new payment processor—unlocked 20 percentage point margin uplift and laid the foundation for leading-edge customer experiences. Led a cross-functional team of 15 through PSD2 compliance on a compressed timeline. Regulatory deadlines don’t care about your tech debt.

Redesigned customer lifecycle operations to enable product-led growth before it was a thing. Increased book size per representative by 2-3x by building systems that scaled without adding headcount.

What I learned: 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. Also learned how to work a boardroom. Decided I wanted to build, not advise.

Engagement Manager (final role)

Led the founding of a pan-European payment infrastructure company—board composition, regulator strategy across 5+ jurisdictions, vendor selection, executive hiring. Presented directly to bank CEOs and supervisory boards across multiple countries. The kind of complexity where one wrong regulatory decision kills the entire business model.

Built AML transformation programs, digital strategies, and payment product roadmaps for Tier 1 banks across the Nordics and Western Europe. Delivered outcomes in weeks that became repeatable methodologies across engagements.

Learned to see payment rails not as constraints but as building blocks. SEPA, card schemes, real-time settlement—the infrastructure already exists. The innovation is in how you translate it. Crafted and ideated innovative payment solutions for a Tier 1 bank. Three out of seven concepts became real products over the following years.

What I learned: European payment rails are fragmented for reasons. Regulatory compliance is architecture, not process. Executive presence comes from knowing the details cold, not hiding behind slides. And advisory work teaches you what’s possible—operating teaches you what actually works.

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