Ep. 130 - Connecting Clients to Markets Others Can't Reach, with CAB Europe (Crown Agents Bank)

Jasmine Chana (0:05)

Welcome back, I'm Jasmine Chana from The Payments Shed Live in Lisbon. Today, I'm joined by Mike Goodenough, CEO and Managing Director of CAB Europe. Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Goodenough (0:15)

Nice to meet you.

Jasmine Chana (0:16)

If you could start by telling us a bit about yourself and CAB Europe, that would be great.

Mike Goodenough (0:20)

Perfect. Yeah. So I'm probably like a lot of people that you interview of my age. I've been in payments for a long time, so I won't give you the exact time, but I've been really lucky, so I've worked for a scheme, I've worked for a bank, I've worked for a payments company, managed to travel all over the world. So, yeah, kind of payments is in my blood a little, and I joined Crown Agents Bank Europe just four months ago. I still have the buzz and the glow of excitement as we build things in Europe, and it's really exciting to be here and tell you a little bit about it, because Crown Agents Bank generally, but Crown Agents Bank Europe, we're not particularly very well known outside of Africa. When you say our name in Africa, everybody knows us, but outside of that, we're having to spread the word a little bit, so hopefully today I'll give you some dates and some numbers that I'm 100% sure no one else over the next two, three days will mention.

Jasmine Chana (1:21)

Nice, and Crown Agents Bank combines nearly 200 years of heritage with a growing international footprint, so Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, as well as New York. How did Crown Agents Bank Europe go from its long history to the international network it has today?

Mike Goodenough (1:37)

Yeah, so right, so I think that's really, because I guarantee no one else will sit here and say, we were founded in 1833 We sound like founded for two years or we're a startup. So that's kind of cool. It comes with a legacy.

The name gives it away if you think about it a bit. So we, originally, in 1833, Agents of the Crown. So the bank itself was really key in the UK to be still in the money transfer business. So it was kind of really corporate financing. It was involved in trade in lots of countries around the world, particularly countries that were linked to the UK. So that was in Africa, it was in the Middle East, it was in Asia Pacific. And since then, we've expanded. So we had a long period of time, which I won't go into, which was super interesting, but between 1833 and 2016, a lot of stuff happened.

But I think that's the moment to pick it up. So in 2016, we were bought by Helios, which was a private investment company. And then as we started to move away from being this very traditional bank, linked to markets in a certain way, to thinking more about payments, but thinking more about the markets that we operated in.

So we grew, revenues grew. And then the next big step for me was in 20, I would say 2024 That was when the office was opened in Amsterdam to cover Europe and to actually achieve our payment license there. 2025, we opened a representative office in New York. And in 2026, so earlier this year, we opened an office in Abu Dhabi. And later this year, we'll open another office in Guyana. And we're still expanding. And I think when I talk about this, there's some key words. So when I talk about what we do, it's very much about hubs, it's very much about frontier markets, it's very much about our network. And I talk a lot about corridors. So it's those corridors that we operate in. So those offices are clearly putting us in a position to be close to our network. This is where we have our solutions in these countries, or where our clients are. So of course, in Africa, in the Middle East, we have part of our solutions.

We operate with 120 plus currencies and markets, 800 currency pairs, some more numbers, particularly interesting. I think what is interesting is 30 central banks that we have a relationship with, and that helps us with our relationships with a lot of the local banks. So that's, I think, the differentiator for us is we have these relationships in the local markets, which helps our customers that are not in those local markets access them. And to be honest, they're all the difficult markets in Verticommerce.

Jasmine Chana (4:40)

Yeah. Well, that's quite the transformation, and I guess gives you an advantage to newer banks then coming in because you have those connections, like you said, right? Yeah.