United Fintech names three new partners in leadership shift

United Fintech has appointed three new partners and established a senior leadership team, formalising a long-term partnership model at the financial technology group.

The new partners are Guy Hopkins, Rasmus Bagger and Darren Coote, taking the total to six alongside Founder and Chief Executive Officer Christian Frahm, Tom Robinson and Marc Levin.

The changes mark a new phase for the business, founded in 2020, which serves banks, hedge funds, brokers and asset managers through a single platform. More than 250 financial institutions use its technology, including 11 of the 12 largest banks in the world.

Its shareholders include Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Danske Bank, Standard Chartered and Danske Growth Capital. These investors sit outside the newly defined partnership, described as the group's internal ownership structure.

Ownership model

The revised structure separates long-term internal ownership from external shareholdings. Under the model, the partners are responsible for helping build the business over the long term, while the senior leadership team manages day-to-day operations.

The leadership team consists of Frahm as Chief Executive Officer, Bagger as Chief Commercial Officer, Levin as Chief Operating Officer and Hopkins as Chief Product Officer. Levin returns to the Group Chief Operating Officer role after most recently leading the asset management division.

United Fintech has built the business by bringing together specialist technology operations focused on institutional finance. In outlining the backgrounds of the new partners, the group highlighted Hopkins' role in building FairXchange in foreign exchange analytics and market intelligence, Bagger's role in building the global commercial organisation, and Coote's role in building Cobalt in foreign exchange infrastructure.

Frahm said the arrangement reflects how the group wants to balance growth with continuity. "Together, we proved that financial institutions are willing to build and share technology through a neutral platform," said Christian Frahm, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of United Fintech.

"This partnership recognises the people who built this with me and gives them the opportunity to help build what comes next. Infrastructure is a long-term business. The people who build it should have the opportunity to own it for the long term. We built United Fintech 1.0 together. Now we are building the infrastructure layer for the future of wholesale finance," he added.

Bank backing

The governance update comes as United Fintech seeks to deepen its role with large financial institutions that increasingly want to share or co-develop technology rather than maintain separate systems. Its investor base gives it backing from major wholesale banks across several regions, an unusual feature for a fintech group that also positions itself as independent.

That neutrality is central to its pitch. United Fintech positions itself between financial institutions and the technology they depend on, with a model designed to let firms use common infrastructure without handing control to any single bank.

United Fintech operates across capital markets, commercial banking, and wealth and asset management. It employs about 200 people across 11 countries.

Next phase

The group's longer-term aim is to become a common infrastructure layer through which financial institutions discover, adopt, build and share technology. It is also placing greater emphasis on AI-native products and on developing tools with customers.

That approach reflects a broader shift in wholesale finance, where banks and asset managers are looking for ways to reduce duplicated technology spending while still meeting the demands of trading, operations and client service. Shared industry platforms have drawn greater attention as institutions weigh cost, interoperability and the speed of software deployment.

United Fintech argues that more technology used across wholesale banking, capital markets and asset management will ultimately be built, governed and distributed through common platforms. For now, the latest changes put a more formal ownership and leadership structure around the group as it seeks to evolve from a collection of acquired and developed businesses into a more integrated platform serving large institutions worldwide.