Team8, a company-building, venture group backed with strategic funding from Microsoft, Walmart, Barclays and Moody’s, among others, earlier this week announced the launch of Team8 Fintech, a practice focused on founding and scaling transformative fintech companies.
Team8 Fintech is led by former President & CEO of Israel’s largest bank, Leumi Group, Rakefet Russak-Aminoach, Founder & President of digital payments unicorn Payoneer, Yuval Tal, and founder and former chief product officer of social trading network and multi-asset brokerage unicorn eToro, Ronen Assia. Galia Beer Gabel, former Head of Business Development for PayPal across Eastern Europe, Israel and Africa, is also joining Team8 Fintech as part of the founding team that brings a wealth of expertise across retail banking, credit, payments, eCommerce and trading.
Team8 Fintech will aim to create both B2B and B2B2C companies that empower industry players with new technologies and new business offerings to ensure they stay relevant and gain a competitive advantage. The foundry will build companies that enable incumbents, largely operating with legacy infrastructure, to hyperscale their digital transformation. For established fintechs, typically offering niche solutions, Team8 Fintech will create companies that enhance their value propositions with more diverse and robust capabilities and broaden their business models. The practice will also target non-financial companies with significant customer bases and relevant customer touchpoints where a financial service offering may be beneficial. Team8 Fintech will create companies providing embedded fintech solutions to address these opportunities, enabling such non-financial companies to become new fintech providers, benefiting from new revenue streams and enhanced customer engagement.
By leveraging Team8’s signature foundry model of company building, Team8 Fintech will aim to ideate novel solutions to address the problems and opportunities of its target audience. The foundry will partner with exceptional entrepreneurs to co-found new companies, bringing together its domain expertise and company-building capabilities to mitigate the complexity of building companies for this highly regulated and fragmented market; ultimately accelerating the path to success. Leveraging and extending the Team8 Village – an extensive rich ecosystem of corporate executives and investors that provide a privileged insider’s view to enterprise challenges and fintech opportunities – a key benefit for companies. It will also support startup progression through its trademark disciplined and rigorous approach, utilizing the group’s in-house team of dozens of domain experts, researchers, ideators, marketers, business developers and talent recruiters based in New York and Tel Aviv.
A pioneer in the global digital banking arena, Russak-Aminoach has been listed in Fortune Magazine’s “100 Most Powerful Women” three times since 2015 and included in the BBC’s “100 Most Inspirational and Influential Women”. At Bank Leumi, Russak-Aminoach headed Israel’s oldest bank and turned it into the largest market cap wise by implementing groundbreaking digital transformation strategies including the establishment of LeumiTech, the Group’s high-tech banking arm, and the launch of neobank Pepper, one of the world’s first fully digital banks launched by an incumbent.
“The financial industry is facing a perfect storm, with the decentralization of financial services ushering in an unprecedented era of complexity and collaboration. No one player, old or new, will own the entire fintech stack. Our team has a deep understanding of the needs and challenges of key industry players, providing a broad array of capabilities and perspectives to create companies that will seize the opportunities now being presented,” said Rakefet Russak-Aminoach, Partner at Team8 Fintech. “In order to execute leading-edge fintech and gain the trust of the financial services industry, a strong technology partner is vital – Team8 is renowned for creating best-in-class technology companies and I’m excited about the fintech powerhouse we’re going to build.”
“We’re delighted to welcome an outstanding fintech team, who bring unparalleled expertise across the financial spectrum. Coupled with Team8 Group’s deep domain expertise in data, AI, cybersecurity and privacy, we have the experience and insight to successfully enter this sector and partner with exceptional entrepreneurs to build transformative fintech companies. This cements another important milestone in Team8’s journey as we expand our foundry model and become a multi-sector venture group.” said Team8’s Founding Partner Nadav Zafrir.
Team8 Group currently operates Team8 Enterprise, a foundry vehicle that builds cyber and data companies, and Team8 Capital, an investment vehicle that funds existing startups across Team8’s areas of expertise. The group expands into a new domain with Team8 Fintech across both company building and investment activities.
