Kamran Zaki, former Adyen COO, joins Iconiq Growth as partner, citing its "uncommon care" culture.
Zaki says global vision requires focused execution, tracing Adyen's expansion from digital payments to unified commerce and embedded products.
Zaki says cross-border money movement is the top stablecoin use case, but questions if the obstacle is technology or regulation.
Ex-Adyen COO sees fintech's IPO window reopening
Kamran Zaki helped build Adyen into a global payments giant over nearly a decade, and now invests at Iconiq Growth. He applies that discipline to fintech's next questions. New areas such as stablecoins and digital identity get the same test of asking what problem they solve, and global ambition only works when execution stays narrow.
Takeaways
Iconiq sells staying power over capital. Companies want investors who stay supportive through bumps, help with customer introductions and executive hires, and connect them to founders at the same growth stage. Zaki spends about 70% of his time meeting new founders, 30% with portfolio companies.
Global vision, focused execution. Zaki, a naturalised US citizen, favours global applicability because it makes the opportunity bigger, if more complex. Trying to do 20 things well makes a company a jack of all trades, so the vision is global and the execution narrow.
Identity is stuck in chicken-and-egg. Consumers and small businesses repeat authentication and onboarding because nobody has solved portable KYC and KYB. India, Pakistan and parts of Eastern Europe issue government IDs that others verify against, while the US relies on private players such as CLEAR.
AI cuts both ways in finance. Fraudsters will use AI to imitate likeness and voice, as with every new technology. Zaki expects better credit risk, underwriting, fraud and compliance decisions, plus wealth advice that makes human advisers more productive or, on an agentic path, replaces them.
Great leaders build complementary teams. Zaki describes great leaders as maniacal problem-solvers who stay humble and talk about the team rather than themselves, and says lasting success comes from a founder assembling complementary people. Product leaders should have run the full life cycle, including sunsetting.
Fintech's IPO window is reopening. Klarna and Chime have filed, bankers tell Armaza that 100 to 200 tech companies have filed confidentially, and Monzo and Revolut are cited as strong European examples. Zaki stays bullish and calls an IPO a milestone, not an end goal.
Adyen's expansion path
Adyen started with digital payments, serving global merchants online.
It added unified commerce, taking payments in physical stores.
Adyen for Platforms let other platforms embed payments for their own customers.
Zaki works backwards from the problem and asks whether stablecoin is the best technology. Cross-border money movement is the use case most often raised.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
The open questions are which corridors are large, whether they are B2B or B2C, and whether the obstacle is technology or regulation.
Armaza argues the most successful stablecoins are pegged to the dollar, strengthening dollar dominance, and points to Latin American neobanks built on dollar rails in high-inflation countries. He calls them a new payments category that is not going away.