Today's guest is Emma Hagan, CEO of ClearBank UK, the UK's first new clearing bank in over 250 years and the infrastructure quietly powering some of fintech's biggest names, from Revolut and Tide to Coinbase, across around 280 financial institutions.
Emma has spent her career at the intersection of banking and regulation, from a graduate programme at HBOS, an incumbent of roughly 75,000 people, to a decade at Silicon Valley Bank, where she joined a 1,400-person business to run the project that won its UK banking licence and went on to become Chief Risk Officer for EMEA.
She joined ClearBank in 2020 as Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and rose to lead its UK business.
What makes her story unusual is where it started. She studied law fully intending to become a lawyer, then changed course after a City internship and landed in banking almost by accident through a graduate scheme. A self-described natural introvert, one of her formative early jobs was selling bus tour tickets on the pavements of London, a role she found deeply uncomfortable but credits with teaching her to put herself out there.
This conversation moves from that early career into the machinery underneath ClearBank: what a clearing bank actually does, why it took 250 years for someone to build a new one, and where stablecoins, AI and embedded banking fit into the future of moving money.
In the full episode, we cover:
- What a clearing bank really do
- Why it took over 250 years for a new clearing bank to launch
- How ClearBank became the infrastructure behind big fintech
- Why she moved from risk and compliance into the CEO seat
- How stablecoins and tokenised deposits are becoming a real means of cross-border payment, not just an asset
- How ClearBank thinks about AI
- What embedded banking actually means
- The new EU licence, the "dollar corridor," and where ClearBank goes over the next five years
- What she looks for when hiring, and why comfort with pace beats a polished CV
Connect with Emma Hagan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-hagan-86ba9b10/
Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/
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