< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

Until recently, Matthew Harris hated “fintech.” Before the term was embraced as representing a hot sectoral trend, it was merely shorthand for the universe of vendors selling technology to financial companies. “The next ten years are going to be characterized by a grinding down of the cost bases of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley,” says Harris, 42, who heads the New York office of Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures. “That’s not a good space to be a vendor.” For Harris, who early in his career worked on private equity deals for Mitt Romney at BCV parent Bain Capital, after graduating from Williams College in 1994 with a BA in political economy, the much more exciting opportunity is in what he calls finsurgents — companies like business lender OnDeck Capital that use technology to compete with incumbent institutions. Harris invested in New York–based OnDeck in 2006 through Village Ventures, an early-stage firm he had co-founded in 2000 with Williams classmate Bo Peabody. Harris’s more than a dozen investments there included TxVia, a mobile payments platform that Google acquired in 2012, and digital banking pioneer Simple, which Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria bought last year. “For me, at a small firm, even with a good personal brand, it was increasingly feeling like I was at a disadvantage, so I decided to come back to Bain [in 2012] and build the fintech practice within the venture arm,” Harris explains. BCV manages $3 billion of committed capital and has 24 investment professionals, five of them on the fintech team. Harris, who has invested $250 million over the past three years in companies like AvidXchange (commercial payments automation) and Digital Currency Group (see Barry Silbert, No. 13), enjoys the flexibility he has at Bain: “I can get interested in and back the best entrepreneur, whether it’s a woman just starting or a guy who’s got a $100 million company.”

 
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures Open Architecture and Next-Gen Technology Help Support Model Delivery Sponsored by BlackRock April 24, 2025 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic

6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners

11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures

16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

21. Michael Schlein Accion International 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA

26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT 27. Derek White Barclays 28. Alex Batlin UBS 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings

31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong