Mr. Matt O'Donnell
Director of Business Development, Earthport PLC

Matt O'Donnell serves as an advisor for the International Association of Money Transfer Networks where he spoke at the inaugural conference and is a founder member of the associations Board.

Matt is Director of Business Development at Earthport PLC, a banking payments utility quoted on the London Stock Exchange. Earthport has invested over $100m in the development of a 'Payments Utility' which is a shared service for remittances and payments used by banks and corporate organisations around the world. Earthport has a strong institutional shareholder base from the UK, USA and the Middle East, and a positive balance sheet. The Earthport service is live for local banking services in 60 countries, and Earthport is a member of SWIFT. The Earthport service lowers the costs and difficulty in making high volumes of international bank payments, and as such it has become a well adopted method of bank remittances around the world.

Matt is a specialist in the payment industry and works across a wide variety of stakeholders from customers in both the banking, card payment, remittance and corporate marketplaces. Matt spends his time between technology and commercial stakeholders, and he describes his role as "making it easy for banks and corporations to get remittance projects off the ground". He has broad contacts and experiences across the payment sector, particularly in London, the USA, Europe, Australia and South East Asia. His role at Earthport includes managing the partner network which includes the relationship with Swift on the SWIFT Workers Remittance project, SIBOS, IBM and Adobe Inc, plus key customers such as Xoom.com, which is one of Silicon Valley's success stories in the remittance market.

Matt has spent the last 15 years living and working from London within the Government, IT and Financial Services sectors. Prior to Earthport, Matt was General Manager for the Public Sector at Synetrix Holdings Limited (formerly Equinox), which produce over $100m revenue delivering new technologies to the Government and Education sectors in the UK. His key achievements at Synetrix included establishing the largest educational IT network in the world, which has already enabled over one million of London's incredibly diverse schoolchildren to benefit from a safe free email, internet and educational content service. Prior to this, Matt ran the Business Development for a FTSE 250 company specialising in financial accounting applications for central and local government departments, and has held posts in US, Scandinavian, and Dutch IT companies in the sale and development of new technologies and business models.

On the personal side, Matt is passionate about sports, is a keen Cricketer. He is married to an American national of Armenian origin and together they are active in the development and understanding of multicultural social issues.