25 January 2023

TINTRA PLC

 ("Tintra", the "Group" or the "Company")

Appointment of Chief Operating Officer

The board of directors (the "Board") of Tintra, the fast-growth Deep Tech business, is pleased to announce the appointment of Paul James as Chief Operating Officer ("COO") as the Group continues to execute its plan to build global banking infrastructure driven by Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing tools.  While this is not a Board position, the COO will be responsible for operational rollout of the Group's ambitious strategy. In particular, Paul's role in ensuring that the innovative technology being developed in-house is seamlessly integrated with the Temenos banking software and remains fully compliant with the various regulations of the multiple jurisdictions in which the Group have authorisation, have applied for authorisation or anticipate having authorisation in the future,.

Paul has 25 years of experience in the financial services and banking sectors including periods at HSBC as a divisional COO and as the original COO of Starling Bank.

During his career, he has been responsible for driving change and operational excellence through organisations globally. Paul has operated at the executive and senior management level of financial firms and demonstrates experience in the management of technology and operations both strategically and operationally. He also has delivered customer experience functions within an operational support environment and has a strategic business development perspective. He has significant experience in the running of critical operations combined with the conduct and leadership.

As COO HSBC EMEA Paul led many strategic reviews to ensure the bank operated consistently globally across all product lines. The area under his remit included global outsourcing, security, disaster recovery and business continuity. Paul led the review and delivery of balance sheet rationalization across several businesses and many countries.

While at Starling Bank, Paul had a key role in the hiring for the rollout of its services and the processes to support on boarding large numbers of new employees in a start-up environment.

Paul James commented, "I am delighted to be joining the incredible team that Richard Shearer has put together at Tintra and to be part of executing on this exciting mission. Having been in financial services for a quarter of a century I am acutely aware of the need for the product offering and solution that Tintra is building. Having spent a number of years building business links in Africa I look forward to bringing both my skills and my relationships to bear as Tintra delivers on something, that if done correctly, will truly change the way that the emerging world banks."

Richard Shearer, Tintra's CEO, said, "Our strategic growth over the past six months has been a really magical thing to be a part of. Our conversations with regulators and governments stretch from Southern Africa to South America and from Singapore to Azerbaijan, where I was honoured last week to be welcomed to a meeting with senior officials of their Central Bank.

These conversations reinforce on an almost daily basis the need for the change we are building through our 3-Tier approach of Regulation, Artificial Intelligence & Cultural Mapping.

The addition of Paul to the C-Level team brings a skillset and experience that combines these broad geographies as we start to execute on government and business side development as the technology stack begins to mature.

Whether it is visiting Davos, speaking to Government officials globally, with funding partners or commercial operators with decades of experience like Paul, I am constantly humbled by the support and validation that our mission receives and maybe even more importantly validation that people are "buying what we are selling".  

Our mission is big, and our team is truly brilliant, however it is always the best execution that wins out over ideas and concepts alone.

We are now at that part of the curve where bringing together the ideas, relationships and inventions into a deliverable product during 2023 demands a highly experienced doer to sit alongside the great thinkers already working so hard at Tintra.

Paul is the ideal fit to do this, with a deep history of banking, experience in Africa and a strong technological understanding, he covers all of our three verticals.  I welcome him today with much anticipation as he joins to take our mission of using Artificial Intelligence to make Real Change to the next level."

Mr James currently holds no shares in the Company.

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