James Owusu, CEO and founder at Kord, on building an FCA-regulated platform for high-value transactions and why fintech avoids its least glamorous markets.
Kord was set up in 2020 to take the administrative friction out of high-value transactions. It is an FCA regulated UK fintech that brings client onboarding, identity verification, anti-money laundering checks and payment processing into a single workflow for law firms, conveyancers and estate agents.
The company closed a £6.4 million Series A in July 2026, led by Guinness Ventures with participation from Beringea, SFC Capital and angel investors. Revenue grew from £600,000 to almost £4 million over the preceding year, and the platform now serves more than 100 businesses across the legal, property and financial sectors.
James Owusu founded Kord after eight years in financial services, first as a mortgage adviser at NatWest and then in wealth management at Barclays, while building a £2.5 million property portfolio in Norwich.
In this In Profile, James Owusu, CEO and founder at Kord, discusses building an operating layer for regulated professional services firms, the sector’s habit of chasing its most comfortable customers, and why compliance can no longer be a point-in-time check at onboarding.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Kord exists to eliminate the friction, delays, and security risks that cause high-value transactions to fall through. Every year, administrative bottlenecks in high-value transactions, such as property sales and legal settlements, cost the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds, while also straining the people and businesses involved. Kord was founded to fix this broken process.
Founded in 2020, Kord is an FCA-regulated UK fintech simplifying client onboarding, identity verification, and payment processing for businesses in regulated industries. Trusted across the property, legal, and financial sectors, our secure end-to-end platform enables businesses to manage high-value transactions seamlessly from start to finish.
Rather than relying on a patchwork of siloed compliance and payment tools, Kord unifies the entire workflow. We allow clients to onboard faster, save money, and stay compliant in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
It has been a high-achieving year for Kord. Revenue grew nearly sevenfold, jumping from £600,000 to almost £4 million, showing a clear demand for streamlined compliance and payment platforms. We also crossed a major customer milestone, now serving over 100 businesses in regulated industries across the legal, property, and financial sectors.
Our strong growth and commercial traction opened the door to investor interest, and in July we closed £6.4 million in Series A funding, led by Guinness Ventures, with participation from Beringea, SFC Capital, and angel investors.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
Before founding Kord in 2020, I spent eight years in financial services, including advising mortgage customers at NatWest where identity and source-of-funds checks were part of my daily role. At the same time, I was building my own £2.5 million property portfolio in Norwich and began to experience the process from the other side. This is when I became aware of how repetitive and frustrating the process is for both parties.
Driven by the challenge of finding and assessing tenants for my properties remotely, I built a verification app to help manage the process. When the system attracted over 60 applicants in a short window and dramatically accelerated tenant placement, I knew the concept had potential far beyond my own portfolio.
Experiencing the problem firsthand, both as a regulated professional and as a customer, gave me a deep, ground-level understanding of where legacy payment and compliance systems break down. That dual perspective became the blueprint for Kord. It gave me the conviction to take the plunge during lockdown and build an integrated platform that solves those exact operational bottlenecks for businesses and their clients alike.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The best ideas in fintech do not come from finance. They come from watching how people actually work. Look at a payment on paper, and it seems like a solved problem. Sit next to the person who has to make that payment, in their job, on their worst day, and you find the payment was never the problem. The problem was the ten minutes before it and the audit trail after it. From the outside, it looks like there is very little left to invent when it comes to money. In practice, almost everything interesting sits in the seam between regulated
financial services and the ordinary mechanics of somebody’s working day, and there are far more ways to close that seam than anyone expects.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
How much of the sector’s talent goes to the most comfortable customers. Consumer apps are crowded because consumer apps are pleasant to build and easy to demo. Meanwhile, the places where money genuinely goes wrong are unglamorous, heavily regulated and full of people doing careful work with tools that were never designed for them. Someone completing on a house will move the largest sum of their life on the strength of a phone call and a set of bank details in an email. That’s not a technology gap. It’s an attention one. The industry decided that the market was boring before it ever looked at it properly.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
Before founding Kord, I spent eight years in financial services, first as a mortgage adviser at NatWest, then in wealth management at Barclays. Both put me next to people at the moment their money moved, and both taught me the same thing from different ends. At NatWest, I sat with people at the largest transaction of their lives, and watched how much of their confidence rested on the professional across the desk rather than on any one system. At Barclays, I learned what regulated process actually costs to run properly, and how much of it is invisible to the customer it protects. I didn’t come to this from software wondering how to disrupt finance. I came from inside the process knowing exactly which parts of it were held together by trust and phone calls, and seeing how best to effect change.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
Building for the wrong customer first, and being slow to admit it. We started out facing the end consumer, because that is the instinct: the consumer is who you can picture. It took longer than it should have to accept that the person with the actual problem, the actual regulatory obligation and the actual budget, was the firm. Everything we’ve built since works because of that correction, and I would not have arrived at it from a whiteboard. I had to build the other thing first and watch it not work. In doing this, we ended up creating something strong for the law firm that takes care of their client relationship.
What has the future got in store for your company?
We raised our Series A to do two things: grow the team and accelerate the product roadmap. Both are in service of the same goal: making Kord the operating layer that regulated professional services firms run on, rather than another tool they log into. We’ve also got some exciting news coming out later this year; it's the clearest expression yet of what Kord is for. Stay tuned.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
With AI tools and deepfakes becoming more sophisticated and accessible, AI-enabled fraud is surging as a result. This is a growing challenge for any industry, but particularly fintech.
Cybercriminals are gaining increasingly sharper tools to launch attacks such as identity theft, document fraud, and payment scams. Many of these attacks target businesses in the regulated industries Kord works with.
Because the threat landscape is changing so rapidly, fintech compliance can no longer remain a static, point-in-time check at onboarding. Maintaining trust across high-value transactions requires an industry-wide shift towards continuous verification, cross- referencing identity, compliance, and payment data dynamically and in real time throughout the entire lifecycle of a deal.
How platforms remain resilient against AI-enabled fraud will be a growing talking point in the industry.
The post In Profile: James Owusu, CEO and founder at Kord appeared first on The Fintech Times.
