About
Ozone
At the cutting edge of open banking
Ozone has been involved in the development of open banking standards from the very beginning, so we understand where the real complexity is and how to make it work for all parties, the bank, the third parties and most importantly the end user.
We founded Ozone as we saw how difficult, expensive and time consuming banks were finding it to deliver high quality, standards based open APIs.
Ozone started by developing the sandbox and reference implementation for the UK Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) – essentially the model example of how to build to the standard. From there, we created an API platform which helps banks and financial institutions deliver great, standards based open APIs which handle the complexity of open banking and open finance.
Our mission
Open banking is now a global phenomenon which is set to change the financial services landscape fundamentally and we’re now working globally to accelerate open banking, by:
Enabling the enablers.
The founders
Chris Michael
Chief Executive Officer
Chris has 30 years’ experience building high performing technology teams across many sectors. He has founded a number of start-ups, including a highly successful digital agency, and has helped many global blue-chip brands generate multi-million pounds of incremental revenue by building innovative technology solutions. Chris led the development of the UK open banking standard, chairing both the OBIE’s API Forum and Technical Design Authority.
Huw Davies
Chief Commercial Officer
Huw has over 24 years experience in payments and financial services, delivering transformational go to market strategies at both major corporations and startups. He has recently led the ecosystem growth at OBIE, driving adoption and usage. Prior to this Huw has undertaken exec roles at Token (Chief Commercial Officer), HSBC (Global Head of Payments), MasterCard (Head of Emerging Payments) and Barclays. Huw also sits on the Advisory Board for the Emerging Payments Association.
Freddi Gyara
Chief Technology Officer
Freddi has over 20 years’ experience as a lead developer, enterprise architect, coach and mentor. He has been the technical lead on large digital transformation programmes across many global blue-chip clients, including Lloyds Banking Group, Vodafone Group, DirectGov (UK), Ministry of Commerce (India), Telstra, BT, Prudential and ARM. Freddi has been the lead architect of the UK open banking standard, and deputy chair of the OBIE’s Technical Design Authority.
Leadership team
Richard Beeston
Chief Financial Officer
Richard is a chartered accountant and international finance leader with 30+ years experience in strategic and commercial leadership across multiple industry sectors. He has held senior finance and leadership positions at Ernst & Young, Kraft-Heinz, WarnerBros, MTG AB, the BBC and Sony Music. Since 2018 Richard has been investing in and working with start-up and scale-up businesses in Fintech, Edtech, Greentech and FMCG ventures, providing hands-on operational and strategic finance leadership.
Stefano Paoletti
VP Growth
Stefano has 24 years experience in commercial and revenue growth roles across a diverse range of industries. Over the past 12 years he has specialised in payments and financial services, building sales and partnership teams and delivering breakthrough growth. Prior to joining Ozone, Stefano has held roles with Token, The Logic Group, Barclays, Office Depot, and currently holds non-exec and advisory positions for multiple start-ups.
Navneet Karnani
Principal Engineer
Navneet has over 35 years of software engineering experience, building enterprise datacenter products, for Veritas, Netscout, Symantec and VMware. He has held roles in software engineering, team management and site ownership, across product sets including storage, data management, network monitoring, network virtualisation and security. Navneet is passionate about building robust products and sustainable engineering practices. He is an “early adopter” of emerging technology, and was the push behind introducing VMware products into Veritas as early as 2006.
Find out more
To see out how the Ozone API can help your business, please contact us.