Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier

Founder and Chief Executive Officer iBanFirst

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of iBanFirst, a cross-border payments and foreign exchange provider for small and mid-sized businesses. The company is French in origin, headquartered in Brussels, and regulated by the National Bank of Belgium as a payment institution. Its customers hold, collect and send funds in more than 25 currencies and manage currency risk from a single “Global Account”. It serves more than 10,000 SMEs, processes over EUR 2.5 billion in transactions a month and employs more than 350 people across Europe. Dusoulier came to iBanFirst as a second-time founder: his first company, the French retail foreign exchange broker Cambiste, was bought by Saxo Bank in 2008. Since 2021, when Marlin Equity Partners became the largest shareholder, iBanFirst has been financed by private equity rather than successive venture rounds, and it has since become profitable.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of iBanFirst. The company’s current materials give 2016 as its launch year; its 2021 materials said it was founded in Paris in 2013.
• Raised EUR 46 million over three venture rounds from backers including Elaia, Bpifrance and Xavier Niel. In May 2021 he agreed a growth equity deal that made Marlin Equity Partners the largest shareholder and made him the second-largest.
• Expanded iBanFirst by acquisition: NBWM and Forexfix in 2019, and the UK FX provider Cornhill, completed in November 2022.
• Took iBanFirst to positive EBITDA from late 2023 and a first full year of profitability in 2024, on revenue of about EUR 65 million.
• In 2006 founded Cambiste, which Saxo Bank acquired in 2008.

Professional Journey

Dusoulier began his career as a trader. By his own account in a 2019 interview, the job soon became repetitive. In 2006, having noticed that almost no French private investors traded currencies, he left to found Cambiste, a French retail foreign exchange brokerage, raising the capital the regulator required to license it. Saxo Bank acquired Cambiste in 2008.

He then went back to founding. According to the same profile, his former intern Jean de La Rochebrochard encouraged the idea and introduced him to Xavier Niel, who became one of iBanFirst’s early backers. iBanFirst aimed foreign exchange and payment services at a different customer from Cambiste’s: small and mid-sized companies that trade internationally, offered as an alternative to the traditional bank offer. The company built its own core banking platform, joined the SWIFT network, obtained PSD2 payment-initiation and account-information accreditation, and was licensed as a payment institution passported across the European Union.

Growth came from three venture rounds totalling EUR 46 million, the last of them a June 2020 round in which Elaia and Bpifrance took stakes. It also came from acquisitions, with NBWM and the German competitor Forexfix bought in 2019. In May 2021 Dusoulier changed how the company was financed. Marlin Equity Partners, the Los Angeles private equity firm, became iBanFirst’s largest shareholder, replacing business angels and some early backers, while Elaia, Bpifrance and Xavier Niel increased their commitments and Dusoulier became the second-largest shareholder. The company said the money would fund product development, international expansion and M&A. In November 2022 it completed the acquisition of Cornhill, a UK foreign exchange provider, and it later secured FCA authorisation as an electronic money institution in the UK.

The company reported positive EBITDA from late 2023 and a first full year of profitability in 2024, with revenue of about EUR 65 million. It has been listed repeatedly in the Financial Times’ ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing companies, and CNBC named it among the world’s top fintech companies in 2025. In November 2025 Dusoulier promoted Sonia Azzouzi Boudier to Deputy CEO and brought Aurore Gaspar Colson onto the board as a non-executive director. In 2026 iBanFirst moved into AI-driven treasury tools, launching an integration that connects Anthropic’s Claude to Microsoft Excel through the Model Context Protocol so that clients can manage payments and FX exposure from their spreadsheets. It was made available to all clients from 1 July 2026. Dusoulier argued that where finance teams once had to adapt to banking software, AI now adapts to the finance team.

Education

No education record was found in any source reviewed.