Francesco Simoneschi

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer TrueLayer

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Francesco Simoneschi is the co-founder and chief executive of TrueLayer, a London company that runs a Pay by Bank network: people pay merchants directly from their bank accounts over open-banking connections rather than by card. He founded it in 2016 with Luca Martinetti, who is now its CTO, and has been CEO since the start. By July 2026 TrueLayer reported almost 30 million users and more than $150 billion in annualised payment volume across 22 countries. Its merchants include Amazon, eBay, Revolut and Ryanair. Simoneschi has recently made the company an acquirer, buying the Nordic Pay by Bank provider Zimpler and the Dutch credit provider in3. He came to TrueLayer after founding and working at earlier technology companies, and he is an angel investor.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded TrueLayer in 2016 with Luca Martinetti; CEO since the company’s founding.
• Raised a $70 million Series D in April 2021, followed by a $130 million round in September 2021 that brought in Tiger Global and Stripe.
• Announced the acquisition of Zimpler in October 2025 and completed it in March 2026 after regulatory approval, extending TrueLayer’s network into Sweden and Finland.
• Announced TrueLayer’s acquisition of in3 in May 2026, adding pay-over-time credit to its Pay by Bank checkout.
• Led TrueLayer into the Financial Conduct Authority’s Supercharged Sandbox in July 2026 to test Pay by Bank for AI-agent (“agentic”) commerce.
• Before TrueLayer, founded the analytics platform Staq.io, later acquired by PlayHaven, and co-founded the angel investment fund Mission and Market.

Professional Journey

Simoneschi is Italian. His SXSW London 2026 speaker biography says that before TrueLayer he built technology ventures in San Francisco and Europe. He founded Staq.io, an analytics platform that PlayHaven later acquired. He was Vice President of Strategy at FOVE, co-founded the angel fund Mission and Market, and held leadership roles at Upsight and DomainsBot.

TrueLayer Limited was incorporated in London on 14 July 2016, first under the name Finport Limited, with Simoneschi as a founding director. The company started by selling open-banking APIs, which let businesses connect to customers’ bank accounts for data and payments. In April 2021 Simoneschi announced a $70 million Series D and wrote that TrueLayer then processed “more than half of the open banking volume in the UK”. Five months later it raised $130 million more, adding Tiger Global and Stripe as investors. His speaker biography says TrueLayer has raised more than $320 million in total at a valuation above $1 billion.

Since then the company has presented itself less as an API provider and more as a payments network competing with cards. In December 2025 it reported passing 20 million users and adding more than a million a month. Simoneschi said the milestone showed that “Pay by Bank has moved from fintech concept to consumer reality.” Growth has also come from acquisitions. TrueLayer agreed to buy Zimpler, a Nordic Pay by Bank company founded in 2012, in October 2025, and completed the deal in March 2026. In May 2026 it announced the acquisition of in3, a Dutch consumer-credit provider. Simoneschi said of that deal: “Today we are doing for credit what we have already achieved for debit.”

In July 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority selected TrueLayer for its Supercharged Sandbox to test payments started by AI shopping agents. Simoneschi argued that agents need “a payment method built for instant, secure, API-native transactions, rather than a checkout form designed for a human typing out sixteen-digit card details.”

On the UK register, he left the board of the operating company, TrueLayer Limited, in January 2025. He remains a director of the parent, TrueLayer Group Holdings Limited, and has been a director of TrueLayer Services Limited since May 2025. His speaker biography says he has made more than 60 angel investments in startups.

Education

No education record was found in any first-party or primary source.