Credit Kudos adds ex-Barclays exec to its senior team 

Manoj Peiris will sit as the fintech’s head of legal to help guide it through the current regulatory landscape and help inform future policy changes.

Open banking-powered credit referencing agency Credit Kudos has bolstered its senior team with former legal counsel at Barclays UK, Manoj Peiris.

Peiris has been appointed the fintech’s newest head of legal to help Credit Kudos build its partnerships with its fellow fintechs and highstreet banks.

The latest appointment brings with him over 16 years of experience in legal roles and open banking, with Peiris previously holding roles at the likes of Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, The Payments Council, Oodle Finance and Société Générale.

“Like Credit Kudos, Manoj has been at the forefront of Open Banking as it has grown in the UK and he has the perfect skill set to help us design solutions specifically suited to the requirements of financial institutions - particularly the incumbent banks as we continue to grow our partners in this space,” Freddy Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Credit Kudos, said. 

“We’re extremely excited for him to join the team as we look to further enhance our proposition, ensuring Open Banking remains the gold standard for credit scoring for fintechs and banks alike.” 

In his role at Barclays, Peiris helped the bank navigate the implementation of the CMA Retail Banking Market Investigation Order 2017, which found that incumbent banks don’t work hard enough to win and retain customers, and the open banking regulation, PSD2. 

Peiris was also the lead advisor on the launch of Barclays’ UK Account Information Service (AIS) and Payment Initiation Service (PIS) through the Barclays mobile app. 

“I have watched Credit Kudos’ growth with interest. What Freddy and his team have built is hugely impressive; Credit Kudos is not only disrupting but entirely transforming the credit reference sector, providing insights and analysis that are game-changing for credit providers,” Manoj Peiris, the newly minted head of legal at Credit Kudos, added. 

“The solutions Credit Kudos has developed will help banks and other lenders extend their services to more people as they look to bounce back from the economic damage of the pandemic and grow their loan books responsibly.”  

Peiris will provide Credit Kudos with strategic advice on new products and services, as well as helping to guide the fintech through the current regulatory landscape and open channels of communication with regulators and industry bodies to inform the fintech’s future policies. 

Earlier this month, Credit Kudos launched a new open banking tool to make credit decisioning faster, enabling lenders to save thousands of hours in manual underwriting by automating policies and implementing real-time decisioning with little to no technical integration.

The fintech also recently teamed up with Curve to help power its “Klarna rival”, Curve Credit. 

The partnership will see Kudos assessing the affordability and creditworthiness of customers who apply for Curve Credit.