Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professionals offers insight from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial industry, from their early years in education, to how they have been able to climb the corporate ladder.
This week, Vivek Savani, UK Country Manager at iBanFirst, explains the art of conversation can lead to meaningful change – from university to becoming a company director – and the difficult decisions he had to take during Covid.
Where did you go to university and what did you study? What impact did this have on your current journey?
I studied Business Management at Queen Mary, and it shaped me in two distinct ways. The course itself gave me a genuinely broad overview of how business works, the kind of grounding that people who haven’t done a similar degree often have to piece together later on, on the job.
But honestly, what mattered just as much was everything that happens around the course.
University is where you build your first real network, where you learn how to read a room and influence people, and that’s a different skill entirely from the friendships you form at school. Financial services has a reputation for being fairly buttoned up, and I think that reputation comes from the people in it as much as anything else. University is where I started learning that you don’t have to play into that.
What first drew you to the payments industry and why have you stayed?
I was fascinated by financial markets long before I actually worked in one. I remember watching Newsnight during the 2007/08 financial crisis, staying up to catch Jeremy Paxman on BBC Two, which is a fairly unusual way for a 23-24-year-old to spend an evening.
But it stuck with me, this idea that something as ordinary as a mortgage, something almost everyone needs at some point, could end up unravelling the entire global economy. That was the moment I decided this was an industry worth properly understanding.
A friend later pointed me towards an opportunity in the industry, and it felt like the right test: could I actually build a career somewhere that combined markets, client relationships and constant change?
It gave me the best of both worlds, a genuine, ongoing interest in FX and payments, combined with the challenge of building something commercially. I’ve stayed because the industry never sits still. Rates move, client needs change, regulation evolves, and you have to keep pace with all of it. That’s exactly what keeps it interesting after all these years.
Are there any lessons from your first role in the industry which you still draw on?
The value of asking good quality questions. It sounds obvious, but it’s a genuine skill, and it’s one of the things I still spend a lot of time on with my team. You cannot advise a client properly, on FX exposure, on payment flows, on anything, if you haven’t first understood what’s actually driving their situation.
I often compare it to piecing together a case, except the client controls the pace entirely. You might have milliseconds to work out your next question before the conversation moves on without you. That principle holds regardless of the function, client-facing, compliance, settlements, it doesn’t matter.
Asking the right question at the right moment is what separates people who genuinely understand a client’s business from people who are just going through the motions.
When was your first big break in the industry? Why was this such a significant moment for you?
Becoming a Director and taking equity in Cornhill International Payments back in 2020. Up until that point, my view of the business was fairly narrow by necessity, focused mainly on client relationships and commercial growth. Joining the board changed that completely.
Suddenly, I could see how every part of the business needed to work in step with every other part, operations, compliance, technology, and how much of that coordination is invisible from the client-facing side but essential to actually making the whole thing function.
That change in perspective is what I’d point to as the real turning point in my career, and it’s exactly the experience that put me in a position, a couple of years later, to lead Cornhill through its acquisition by iBanFirst, the company I lead in the UK today.
Was there a moment you faced in the industry which really challenged you? How did you overcome this?
COVID landed almost immediately after I’d taken on equity and joined the board at Cornhill, which was, to put it mildly, difficult timing. Furloughing staff while trying to keep a business running was one of the harder things I’ve had to navigate. We got through it, and by 2021 it became clear that the smarter long-term move for Cornhill was to find scale rather than remain small and exposed to the next shock that came along.
That’s what led to the deal with iBanFirst. Until then, I’d never been through an M&A process before, so a lot of it was learning in real-time, sitting through due diligence and trying not to let on that I was working things out as I went. The integration that followed brought its own complications too, particularly around the regulatory complexity of servicing clients across the EU from a UK entity.
Looking back, it was an extraordinary thing to have gone through, and it laid the foundation for the role I do now as UK Country Manager at iBanFirst.
What are some of the skills you deem essential to starting in your industry and how have yours developed over the years?
Communication, honesty, and genuine curiosity about how markets actually work. Technical knowledge can be taught to almost anyone, but that curiosity can’t be manufactured, and I’ve seen that play out repeatedly over the years.
People who come into this industry without any real interest in FX, payments or the wider financial landscape tend to plateau quickly. That interest doesn’t just make the work more enjoyable, it makes you noticeably better at reading what’s actually going on for a client or a market, and that’s what clients ultimately value.
Who was your biggest role model – inside or outside of your industry – who continues to inspire you in your current career?
My dad, Dr. Naren Savani, and he has got nothing to do with finance. He’s a retired GP, and growing up we couldn’t walk through town without someone stopping to talk to him, he had thousands of patients and it felt like everyone knew him.
What always struck me was how knowledgeable he was. I could ask him almost anything and he’d have a considered answer. That’s stayed with me, this idea that you should keep building your own expertise, keep being someone people can turn to for a proper answer. I’d say a lot of my curiosity, and probably a fair amount of how I deal with clients and people generally, comes from watching him.
If you didn’t work in the industry, what other career option would you have pursued or would have loved to
I’d be in law. There’s something appealing about building a case from the facts and constructing an argument that actually wins, without tipping over into spin or anything remotely unethical.
I’ll admit I got through the entire run of Suits and thought it looked like the most exciting job going. Our in-house legal team would probably tell you the reality is considerably less glamorous, but the appeal of that kind of work has never really left me.
Lastly, what is some advice you would give to an aspiring person looking to get a start in your respective industry?
Perseverance, paired with proper preparation. This is a genuinely difficult industry to break into, there are always more people looking for a role than there are companies hiring for one, so persistence matters more than people expect.
But preparation matters just as much. I’ve interviewed a lot of candidates over the years who haven’t taken the time to understand what the company actually does or what problem it solves for its clients, whether that’s FX risk, cross-border complexity, or something else entirely. You don’t need to know every detail going in, but you should absolutely understand what you’re putting yourself forward for.
