Victor Trokoudes is founder and chief executive of Plum, a London, England, app that sets money aside for savers and invests it. A Greek Cypriot, he studied economics at Harvard and built Plum with Alex Michael, a fellow Cypriot who became its chief technology officer. Read our review of Plum.
Three Weeks at Morgan Stanley Before Lehman Fell
He began as a trader at Morgan Stanley three weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, and stayed two years before deciding trading was not for him. "You don't feel like you create stuff. I liked the idea of building something that would have value," he told Greek Reporter in 2019. A hedge fund he launched next raised its first money but could not keep raising more, and it wound down.
From an INSEAD Lecture to Wise's Early Team
During an MBA at INSEAD, a talk by a PayPal executive drew him to financial technology. He founded Bluebird Global, a reseller of iPad point-of-sale systems that he later sold, then joined TransferWise, now Wise, where he built a team of 25 and helped take the service into 25 markets. "When I started, we were five people, and when I left the company it had 500 employees," he said.
A Savings Contest That Became Plum
Plum began as a challenge with Michael over who could save more. He drew up a budget; Michael wrote a program that worked out what he could safely set aside every few days. "Turns out, Alex had saved nearly double what I had!" he wrote on the Plum blog in 2016. He later told the Evening Standard that in his 30s he "still wasn't managing my money as well as you'd think, despite being an ex-trader who studied economics."
