Greg Root, Chief Operating Officer at Momentum Financial Services Group (MFSG) has built his career by moving between industries that most executives treat as entirely separate. –  and picking up something useful in each one.

He started at a business process outsourcer, joining as one of roughly ten employees. By the time he left, the company had grown to 30,000 staff and had been taken through a private equity acquisition. It was an early lesson in scaling organisations fast. “I got a chance to lead some large teams early in my career,” he says, "and got the benefit of a lot of travel because of the nature of BPO.”

From there, Greg spent a decade in telecom. Seven of those years were at one of the country's largest providers, where he worked across process transformation, led the technical support function and helped run the small and medium business division. A senior mentor there gave him significant responsibility at a young age, supporting his development and many successes along the way. He then moved into fintech in progressively senior roles.

Greg spent seven years across two related companies: D&H and then Finastra, a global financial technology firm formed through a private equity buyout. At Finastra he led operations and support across offices in India, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, London, Paris and Canada. 

At MFSG, where he has been since 2024, Greg’s remit spans the operations functions: contact centre, back-office functions, payments, fraud and the enterprise project management and transformation offices. He notes that as the organisation continues to transform “AI will enable it to more rapidly address our challenges & unlock opportunities we may not have been able to address in the past.”  He is equally clear that technology alone is not the answer and that bringing employees along through change is just as important as deploying the tools.

Karina Sidhu, Chief Technology Officer at MFSG

Karina Sidhu has spent ~20 years in financial services and her career has tracked the industry's own transformation almost step for step.

She spent a decade at a large Canadian bank, working across a range of technology roles that took her from merger and acquisition integrations through to large-scale digital transformation. During that period, she worked on early implementations of Apple Pay and Google Pay and contributed to initial thinking around blockchain applications in retail banking. It was, she says, an education in how a single organisation can offer multiple careers. “No one year is the same as another,” she says.

From there Karina moved into capital markets technology then became Chief Technology and Data Officer at a Canadian pension fund, before joining MFSG. Her current mandate is broad: she leads technology, data, AI enablement, cybersecurity and business technology – and also serves, in effect, as the company's Head of Cyber.

At MFSG, Karina is overseeing a shift away from technology as a back-office function and towards what she calls “technology enablement” – a model in which tech, data and AI, are active drivers of business outcomes rather than just development and infrastructure. 

“Marrying technology and strategy is much harder than just building good tech solutions,” she explains. 

“It is about achieving business goals with the right tools and technology, fit for purpose, solutions”