What’s your name and what do you do at Liberis?

My name is Vino Vamadevan and I’m the Director of Compliance.

What makes you proud to work here?

I have always thought a great place to work centres around the people, and this comes in 3 key areas – my colleagues, our customers, and our partners! I have great interactions with my colleagues and we try and collaboratively fix common problems – from top to bottom, regardless of seniority, job titles etc. there are no egos! Our customers are another important aspect of this, having the ability to help through business finance to support their needs whether that that means resolving cashflow problems, recruiting staff, or expanding; from a compliance perspective, that means truly putting customers at the heart of everything we do. The final piece of the puzzle is our partners and working together to realise our common goal of providing businesses with access to finance.

What are your stand-out memories of working at Liberis so far?

I have several good memories from the last 2 years – It ranges from setting up the compliance team, looking at different ways we can support customers, making sure we are monitoring our key controls. However, for me a standout memory has been the awareness and educational pieces of work – whether it’s Treating Customer Fairly Week – which included quizzes, prizes, and cakes (cakes from our TCF themed Liberis Bake Off) or the FinCrime Week which included the infamous FinCrime Rap including members of legal and compliance team. This was a standout achievement because it’s crucial to make key regulatory matters engaging but also add a bit fun.  Compliance doesn’t have to be boring!

 Since working here, what ways have you developed – personally and/or professionally?

I love the fact we are operating across multiple jurisdictions – UK, EU and US. As someone working in compliance this helps me develop regulatory understanding and nuances across these regions. I have also developed how we respond to business stakeholders and holding the compliance team accountable to strict deadlines.

What makes Liberis different from anywhere else you’ve worked?

As a business, Liberis has a great opportunity to scale the business on a couple of fronts which is both interesting and different to the other financial services businesses that I have worked at. Firstly, we have great opportunity to work with great partners and support their merchants with access to business finance. Secondly, there’s a great opportunity to work in different markets and develop regional differences and approaches.

What do you look forward to most in Liberis’ future?

To continue enabling SMEs to access much needed finance to grow and make our embedded finance solution available to more SMEs both in existing regions and expanding into new geographies. Working in compliance, I look forward to making sure we have the right compliance strategy and framework to help achieve this to make sure our customers get good outcomes – that’s through onboarding and in life management.