Peter Hazlehurst is co-founder and chief executive of Synctera, which helps fintechs and banks launch accounts, cards and money movement. He has been building banking software since 1993, when he wrote a core banking system at 22, and his career has run through nearly every layer of the stack since.
From Law School to a Core Banking System
He grew up in Australia, studied law, and taught himself to code in a gap-year job with the government. He then went to Silicon Valley and became the first engineer at Phoenix International, a core banking company that went public in 1996. Its system ran on Windows on a small server, at a time when banking ran on mainframes.
Yodlee and Google Wallet
At Yodlee he worked on account verification and aggregation, built on direct data feeds from the biggest US banks. He also held engineering leadership roles at Nokia. At Google he led mobile payments in the Google Wallet era. When carriers controlled the phone's secure chip, Google bought the processor TxVia and routed each tap through a virtual card, a form of tokenization before the industry had a word for it. TxVia's founders also had a side project, the Money20/20 conference, which Google let them keep.
A Bank for Uber Drivers
He was chief operating officer at Postmates, then ran payments at Uber, where he led Uber Money and tried to build a digital bank for drivers. Uber had hundreds of payments engineers; most companies do not. Synctera, founded in 2020, was his answer: give any fintech the same capabilities without the infrastructure.
Through the Downturn
Synctera came through the 2022 to 2024 fintech downturn on several Series A extensions and reached break-even in mid-2025. In March 2025 it raised $15M and signed Bolt as its largest customer. He has talked through those years on the Fintech Leaders podcast.
He started by moving banking off the mainframe and onto a box anyone could run. Thirty years later he says it is back to the future, with banks sharing infrastructure in the cloud, and he is building it again.
