Silvia Calls BIO :
Silvia is an enthusiastic and experience fintech lawyer and entrepreneur. As a fintech entrepreneur and owner of www.abogadosfintech.com – a legal firm focused on fintech startups – she has acquired a 360 overview on tech, business, operational process and customer needs. As such, her experience includes building finance software and business models, preparing financial plans, and dealing with investors.
She launched www.abogadosfintech.com and works there as a fintech lawyer since 2017.
And of course, she also has more than a decade of experience in fintech regulation, ranging from tasks like issuing Banking license and dealing with regulators up to advising on all legal areas related to commercial contracts, payments lending, PSD2, GDPR, AML/KYC, etc.
In total, Silvia has accumulated over 15 years of experience as a legal professional, including 10+ years in the fintech industry. She has founded smartcredit.es, a regulated Crowdfunding entity nº registration 35 at CNMV. Her career spans positions as Legal Director at UK fintech Wonga, Head of Legal and Compliance at Barcelona fintech Prestamos Prima Group as well as at US fintech Reloadly. Before that, she also worked at BBVA (Formerly CatalunyaCaixa), Circulo Legal..
On the academic side, Silvia first studied Law at Universidad Alfonso X El Sabio and completed further educational master in business management PDG at EADA Business School, a Master in mediation, master in digital marketing and management. Eventually, her vast experience enabled her to go from student to teacher, so she has been helping several people as a business mentor at fintech incubator and accelerator Tenity (formerly F10) and as a professor at Institut d’Estudis Financers, LaSalleTech Nova, and ESADE
Andreu Honzawa Bio:
Andreu is an experienced FinTech compliance and operations specialist, and a certified Governance, Risk and Compliance officer by the International Compliance Association (ICA). He started his career in 2010 in the field of online and mobile banking software (www.cyclos.org) for microfinance institutions and digital complementary currencies, with the Dutch foundation STRO and the IT company Ubiquat Technologies. During 6 years, he participated in two consecutive EU-funded projects with local administrations in the Barcelona metropolitan area, with the objective of setting up mobile payment systems (Grama and Vilawatt) to promote local independent merchants. These have been the leading projects in Spain setting up local payment systems where a municipality conditions grants to social and civic entities to their expenditure in the local economy.
After that, Andreu joined Colu Technologies, a Tel Aviv-based crypto startup aiming to obtain an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license in Gibraltar to operate in the UK market. As a director, he led the setup of the EMI, the operation of the license, as well as the devolution of the license when the company decided to change the product and move to the US market. This gave Andreu an end-to-end view of the licensing process, in particular in regards PSD2, AML/CTF, Sanctions and KYC/KYB requirements.
Taking advantage of that experience, Andreu joined the firm Connociam consulting and led its department of fintech projects. Using the composable banking approach, the API economy and an IT team under his supervision, together with his knowledge from market research of RegTech providers, Andreu supported a number of startups and projects in Spain, USA, Germany as well as a Denmark-led project in Kenya, in particular with the deployment or customization of Cyclos mobile and banking software, or with EMI or Payment Institution licensing processes.
More recently, Andreu was the House and Compliance Officer at the crypto startup Potion Labs, leading several in-house projects for the launch of the Potion protocol, a p2p derivatives platform on the Ethereum blockchain, winner of the #Hackmoney 2020 hackathon and rising USD 12 million. The release method was based on radical decentralization, using Potion NFTs sold to the community for them to open source the code and operate it through a DAO. More recently, Andreu has joined www.abogadosfithech.com to support projects in his areas of expertise.