Simon Vans Colina

Simon Vans-Colina is a British fintech engineer and entrepreneur who has spent more than two decades building banks. He started coding at age 11, and by 2008 was working in banking technology at Citibank. His defining role came as a member of the founding engineering team at Monzo, the UK neobank unicorn, where he led work on open banking and APIs — earning him a reputation as one of the technical faces of the UK challenger-bank movement (he was a frequent conference speaker and interviewee representing Monzo, e.g. at FinTech FaceOff 2018).

In 2019 he co-founded Fronted, a London fintech that gave renters a way to finance their tenancy deposits and repay them monthly. He served as CTO alongside co-founders Jamie Campbell (ex-Bud) and Anthony Mann (ex-Apple). Fronted launched its product in early 2021, was backed by Passion Capital, and raised over £20m in debt and equity across its life. Vans-Colina stepped back from day-to-day operations when he moved to Singapore to become CTO of BigPay; Fronted was ultimately dissolved in May 2023 (his @fronted.xyz email dates from this venture).

Since March 2023 he has been Co-Founder and CTO of Pave Bank, which markets itself as "the world's first programmable bank," combining fiat commercial banking (deposit accounts, payments, FX, card issuance) with institutional-grade digital-asset tooling. Pave Bank was founded in 2022 with co-founders Salim Dhanani (CEO) and Dmitry Bocharov, and in October 2025 raised a ~$39m Series A led by Accel (bringing total funding above $44m).

Alongside his operating roles, Vans-Colina has been an active angel investor and side-project founder, backing early-stage startups and launching experiments such as TreeDAO, CryptoClass and London Aerospace. He describes himself simply as someone who "make[s] banks."

• Invests personally as an angel at the seed/pre-seed stage, primarily in the UK, drawing on a large fintech operator network (Monzo alumni, Passion Capital, etc.).
• Strong bias toward fintech, banking/payments infrastructure, and consumer software — areas where his hands-on engineering and neobank-building experience add value beyond capital.
• Increasingly oriented toward web3, digital assets and programmable money, reflected in his Pave Bank thesis that banking should be programmable "beyond standard APIs" and in his crypto side-projects.
• Self-description — "I make banks" — signals a preference for backing technical, product-led founders solving hard financial-infrastructure problems rather than thin fintech wrappers.