As the first ever employee of Ohpen back in 2009, Lydia van de Voort has seen the organisation grow from a small team focused solely on developing the best core banking engine in the world to the international organisation that it is today. Before she took on the role of CEO UK Van de Voort was the right-hand woman of Ohpen’s founder Chris Zadeh and worked as business consultant where she was responsible for optimising business processes between the UK and Dutch office.

Ian Hutchinson, who is appointed as Ohpen UK’s COO, is a City veteran and has over 20 years of experience in UK financial services. Before joining Ohpen as COO, he most recently was Director of Operations at International Financial Data Services (IFDS) where he led a team specialised in platform operations, wrap services, wealth administration services and client relationship management.

Van de Voort and Hutchinson succeed Angelique Schouten who started the London office of Ohpen in 2016. Schouten built the London branch from the ground up and was responsible for obtaining its authorisation from the regulator, hiring the team and bringing in Ohpen’s first British clients. Schouten is named global Board Member focusing on building its commercial organisation, marketing, sales and PR.

50% women
The company culture of Ohpen is all about exceeding expectations and giving it all. 50% of Ohpen UK personnel are women, an anomaly in a typically male dominated financial services industry. Ohpen UK’s workforce consists of 30 men and women and is part of the larger Ohpen group of 150 people.

“Our core values are exceeding expectations, give it all and do more with less. Women and men typically have different characteristics and we just hire the best person for the role. Diversity has turned out to be vital to our success as a business”, says Ohpen UK’s parting CEO Schouten. “Building a team that was a reflection of our core values was the most difficult business challenge over the past two years. This required a balanced set of people with different qualities and resulted in a 50/50 gender split. With the appointment of Lydia and Ian, there is a team in place to keep the company on its diversity course.”

The first order of business for Van der Voort and Hutchison is to go live with the first UK customers of Ohpen.

The fintech scaleup Ohpen delivers a native cloud core banking engine for financial institutions such as banks, asset managers and insurance companies. It’s the first tech company in the world that offers their software solely as SaaS cutting out legacy tech and thus giving Ohpen customers comprehensive flexibility, scalability and compliancy. Ohpen has been active in the UK since 2016.