Helping leaders and teams bend the curve of innovation and value in fintech.
Employing senior operator judgment and global experience to support leaders at the frontier of fintech.
Trusted counsel and practical advice
On-call expertise on issues of strategy, scaling and deals. Support in making the hard tradeoffs: team, business and stakeholder.
- Early product strategy for scalable, compliant fintech
- Practical GTM advice on key customer negotiations and distribution partnerships
- Review of strategic opportunities: M&A, exit, game-changing fundraises
Fintech innovation with unyielding customer focus
Supporting scaled players with fintech interests to innovate and drive customer engagement, growth and profitability.
- Fintech (payments, lending) strategy definition for fintech and non-fintech businesses
- Build, buy or partner decisions
- M&A and partnerships: screening, diligence and execution
Operator mindset, deal experience
Helping investors sharpen perspective to gain edge on investing and portfolio value creation across fintech sub-sectors.
- Commercial and payments-economics diligence
- Thesis development and market mapping
- Portfolio company support for founders, teams and board
David Hirsch
David has spent nearly 25 years working across the fintech value chain (payments, lending, commerce and insurtech) in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. The deals and commercial wins he has led, from Series A first customer deals to multi-billion-dollar Big Tech partnerships, have consistently bent the curve on growth and profitability.
Most recently, David led Amazon’s partnerships, strategy and M&A for fintech and retail technology (e.g. Just Walk Out, biometric payments, agentic and headless commerce) within its Business and Corporate Development unit, which reports to CEO Andy Jassy. He also sat on Amazon’s payments leadership team. He and his team led multi-billion-dollar negotiations with payment networks, scaled fintechs and financial institutions for Amazon’s consumer, SME and enterprise customers across Retail, Cloud and B2B. They also drove deals which launched and scaled novel third-party payments offerings like Buy with Prime and Amazon Seller Wallet.
Prior to Amazon, David was GM of OODAPay at OODA Health (backed by Oak HC/FT, exited to Cedar), VP and Head of Corporate and Business Development at Klarna, and held roles at American Express and McKinsey & Company. He was also a Non-Executive Director of Tabby, the Middle East buy-now-pay-later unicorn, from founding through to Series B. Today, in addition to his work through Fintech Forward, he is an adviser and LP in venture funds including Nyca Partners and Canaan Partners, and is an active angel investor in fintech.
David holds bachelor’s and MBA degrees from Harvard. He lives in London.