Chris Zadeh steps down as CEO from Ohpen, takes up role as advisor and supervisor

After ten years at the head of core banking provider, Ohpen founder, Chris Zadeh transferred the CEOship to Matthijs Aler from January 1, 2019. In fact, Aler has extensive experience in online banking, including at BinckBank as Managing Director Netherlands and as CEO France where he was ultimately responsible for setting up the French branch.

The 43-year-old will continues as Chairman of the Board, focusing on the overall strategy, customers and future technology use. On the other hand, Aler will take over the daily management of Chris Zadeh.

Based out of Amsterdam, the company presently consist of 150 employees and handles the account administration of banks like Aegon, Robeco and de Volksbank. Chris Zadeh has been active in the financial world for 20 years and previously worked at investor bank Alex.nl and BinckBank. “A platform that would leave the competition far behind and would always work, guaranteed,” says Zadeh.

Back in 2009, Zadeh started Ohpen in an attempt to make the inefficient banking systems faster and better. Ohpen has raised a total of €40M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Feb 5, 2018, from a Series C round. Ohpen is the market leader in the field of core banking in the Netherlands, has a software development office in Barcelona in addition to the head office in Amsterdam.

Talking about his childhood, Chris Zadeh parents got divorced when he was young and his mother worked all day long as a secretary to ABN Amro director Michael Drabbe. It’s worth mentioning here that, a couple of years back, Zadeh was detected with a benign tumor, which according to him felt like a warning. He also said, “If I were to continue for another ten years, I would be sick or dead.”

Chris Zadeh said:

When we started, we were a startup with nothing but our mission to build the best core banking engine in the world. No employees. No customers. No office. After receiving thousands of rejections from banks and a million development hours, we are now a scale-up with customers, offices and sales. Matthijs and I have been colleagues and friends for seventeen years, first at BinckBank and then at Ohpen. If anyone can lead Ohpen, he is.

Matthijs Aler, said:

Chris already saw that banking would go to the cloud at a time when Amazon was still known as a bookstore and cloud was completely unknown. He is a pioneer who has literally overcome all obstacles in getting core banking to the cloud. Ohpen was the first company worldwide to receive supervisory approval for cloud banking. Without Chris, the financial sector would have literally looked different.

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