// about_

I was incredibly lucky to enter fintech and payments during one of its most transformative phases. I lived through the explosion of mobile commerce, the chaotic growth of marketplaces, consolidation waves and PE swooping in, increasing technical complexity and sudden enforced profitability with rising interest rates. Today we are living in the tension between regulatory maturity and the AI gold rush into the headless economy.

During this time I sat at almost every seat at the table, from selling complex financial solutions at arvato / Bertelsmann, to building these platforms and expanding them out of DACH into the UK and US markets during my tenure at Paysafe. Later I led a post-acquisition merger of two platforms at Unzer, before co-founding Payla, to build a first-principles BNPL platform that slots as a feature into any ecosystem. Here I currently lead product, design and engineering as CPO.

Building products, for me, isn’t only zero-to-one. It’s building the teams, orgs and cultures that ship them, building partnerships around them, and building with AI in the loop – in the product itself and in how a company operates. I’m at home in data-heavy, highly regulated B2B and infrastructure platforms – mostly fintech, payments, lending and fraud prevention – and comfortable leading international, distributed teams, speaking multiple languages myself.

Some important things I learned:

• Great teams are very hard to form, but radical candor is always the first step.
• Even the best architecture decisions will eventually come back to haunt you.
• There’s no universal product playbook, your context is everything.
• Being a jack of all trades can make you a master of many.
• And speed is by far the most important KPI.

I live with my family north of Germany’s Black Forest, and when not busy with my work I can frequently be found at heavy metal gigs, touring the outdoors with my camera, cycling along the river Rhine, playing D&D with my kids or turning old MacBooks into Linux servers. My e-reader never leaves my side.