Founder

Matthew Mecke

Founder, Matthew Mecke, has more than 25 years of Digital Payment and related Transaction Gateway Experience. He started his career with First Data Corporation (now Fiserv, NASDAQ: FISV) in the United States. In 1997, he left the U.S. to serve as a Management Executive with First Data Asia in Hong Kong. In 1999, Matthew left First Data and, together with Co-founders and venture capital, created and built Asia’s first multi-currency, on-line payment gateway. The company was Hong Kong-headquartered, First Ecommerce. First Ecommerce was a joint venture with Microsoft and Bank of Bermuda (now HSBC).

Matthew went on to create, build, and publicly list four additional online credit card processing and ecommerce merchant acceptance companies. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of one of those companies, Value Exchange International, Inc. (VEII). VEII is a Hong Kong-based, U.S. publicly traded, credit card processing and merchant-acquiring services company.

The advent of blockchain technology and its ability to transform global payments and countless systems caught Matthew’s attention in a significant way. He mastered the theory and the technology in order to apply it to physical and online payments and transfers. Koinon is the result of that work.

President

Paul Kirkitelos

Paul has been active in the startup world for over 20 years. A theoretical physicist by training, he went on to become a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Later Paul was Founder and CEO of Doral Energy, a publicly traded resource company in the United States, and he has served in an executive leadership or advisory capacity for a number of early-stage companies, including merchant payments and lending, internet video, internet marketing, medical devices, and nutritional products. In the wake of the dot-com crash, Paul co-founded and managed a hedge fund employing quantitative strategies in the equities market. He also has extensive experience in leading executive training and financial education programs. Paul holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia and is a former Research Fellow with NASA’s Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Operations Manager

Andre Bahlmann

Andre has 15 years of industrial project management experience connecting Fortune 500 companies with Asian markets. A native of Germany and a former Master Sergeant in the Germany Army, Andre is a longtime China resident and Mandarin speaker. He has founded several companies in manufacturing and supply chain, leveraging China’s massive growth in manufacturing services. His work has covered a wide range of industries, giving him deep knowledge of the China market.

Advisor

Anthony Robinson

Anthony is a Business Management, Development and Consulting expert with over 23 years’ experience in Asia and North America. He has many years’ experience in IT, online transaction firms and information delivery services and the financial markets. He has been involved with some of Asia’s most influential multi-national, consulting and IT companies such as Dow Jones, InterCapital, Hong Kong’s China dot Com, Japan Ecommerce and Japan’s Value Commerce (a Yahoo company).

Prior to becoming involved in Blockchain and cryptocurrency, he was a commodities and trading analyst in Shanghai, China. He does business development for FusionICO to assist foreign companies to market tech projects in key Asian markets. He also deals with Hedge Funds and investment companies trading with China’s industrial and financial core, as well as identifying investment opportunities in Asia and IT-related companies in North America.

Advisor

Eric Fore

Eric is veteran corporate finance, private equity, and business development professional with over 25 years of international business experience. He specialises in early stage investments in technology and energy ventures with driven, talented entrepreneurs with high growth opportunities. He was one of the pioneers of backing fintech start-ups in the late 1990’s. He was also a Co-founder, Director and senior executive of two Africa-focused, publicly traded energy companies. Currently Eric leads a UAE-based upstream and midstream oil and gas venture investment company. He also regularly mentors, advises, and supports local technology entrepreneurs.

Advisor

Roderick Ruhl

Roderick has 17 years experience in developing startups, focusing on the technical aspects and building & managing development teams. He started his career at Accenture before building his first company in his twenties. He gained extensive practical experience integrating smart contracts into his projects in recent years developing several systems using Ethereum smart contracts for property and asset management. His academic background is in Macroeconomics holding a degree from the London School of Economics and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland where he wrote his thesis on the regulatory landscape of the Singapore banking sector after the Asian Economic Crisis.