A highly experienced engineer, product leader and general manager, he joins TrueLayer as the firm continues its global growth, adding connectivity across Europe, and expanding it’s open banking platform for payments and data. As CPO, Ossama will define and manage product strategy and development across TrueLayer’s Product, Engineering and Design teams.

“Finance is going through a transformation of epic proportions as each financial product, service and process will eventually become accessible as a service through an API call. In the same way that lowering the cost of building software products led to an exponential increase in the number of products and the level of specialisation, a similar phenomena is happening in finance,” Soliman commented.

“This will lead to a cambrian explosion of new services from financial and non-financial companies that are more specialised and can serve customers who have historically been excluded or ill-served by financial services. This transformation is underpinned by financial infrastructure that is being built today. Getting to help democratise access to finance through TrueLayer’s open banking platform is incredibly exciting.”

An engineer at heart, Ossama’s early career in his native Egypt included publishing original research in AI and building software for the manufacture of Black Hawk helicopters. After completing an MBA at Columbia Business School in New York, he moved into financial services working at American Express. There he built one of the first large-scale machine learning deployments at the firm to identify and eliminate customer pain points, before leading product development for its alternative banking products and scaling them to serve millions of customers.

Prior to joining TrueLayer, Ossama was the General Manager for Business Lending at Amazon in Seattle, where he helped to create business focused lending and payments products. He scaled the team to more than 90 people across product, engineering, data science, marketing and operations building machine-learning powered products serving millions of users.

“Living in London has always been something that we wanted to do as a family, it is such a vibrant city, with a huge technology and fintech community. TrueLayer appealed to me because it is at the leading edge of Open Banking and is incredibly ambitious in its objectives,” Soliman explained. “Hearing the co-founders Francesco and Luca’s vision and mission was inspiring. While it was already clear to me that this was a firm who had built an incredibly talented team, it also mattered that the firm's approach to culture and its values were also aligned to mine.”

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and Co-Founder of TrueLayer, commented: “The CPO position is hugely important for us as we continue our global expansion. Ossama’s track record speaks for itself and his wealth of knowledge and experience will be critical during the next phase of our growth. He is passionate about how technology can change lives for the better and the entire team was impressed by his ideas and drive. I’m delighted that with his talent and experience, and with all the options available to him, he wanted to join the TrueLayer family. I have no doubt that he will have a huge impact on our business, our products and our ongoing success.”