“We want to change the face of banking,” said Watson, 45, who is also founder of the Bank of London, a clearing bank for business payments that aims to take on clients in mid-2022. “This is a personal thing that’s very important to me,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call from his New York home.
While Watson is still in talks with regulators in North America and the European Union ahead of the bank’s planned debut, a recent fundraising round valued it at more than $1.1 billion, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
Former chief information officer for Europe, Middle East and global operations at Barclays, Watson is attempting to break the current dominance of four British banks – his former employer, along with