INSEAD

State University of Management (GUU)

NEOMA Business School

CMO at Thunes  -  SFA ExCo

Volt is the new leader in real-time payments. Our next-generation payment network unites domestic schemes to a single harmonised standard. Global, instant and interoperable, it’s driving the shift to an era where real time is the only time.

Volt.io

Chief Marketing Officer

Thunes is a B2B Payments infrastructure company that powers payments for the world’s fastest-growing businesses - from Southeast Asia's superapp Grab and Gig Economy giants to Fintech leaders such as PayPal and Remitly.

As Thunes' first CMO, my goal was to establish a global brand, set up demand generation and growth engine, support pipeline growth, and unlock new revenue streams. 

Within my time with Thunes I:

• Hired and onboarded a team of productive and autonomous experts across Content & Comms, Demand Generation, and Field Marketing; 
• Structured Thunes' marketing strategy, content, communications, and event strategy and plans;
• Launched Thunes first brand campaign, resulting in 3M impressions and driving education on its capabilities;
• Orchestrated the company’s participation in 30+ industry conferences yielding up to 5x ROI from events,
• Launched 35+ public announcements, including funding round, acquisitions and strategic partnerships, which resulted in Thunes being named among the top-250 Fintech startups globally by CB Insights, Top-100 Cross-Border Payments companies by FXC Intelligence, and receiving multiple features in Tier-1 Tech, Broadcast and Industry media, such as Forbes, TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, WSJ etc.;
• Set up the demand generation, ABM and digital marketing practices, unifying its Marketing Technology stack, and introducing key performance metrics for lead generation and qualification;
• Successfully launched email marketing campaigns with 200k+ emails sent annually;
• In addition to that, I also led the Go-to-Market, Product Strategy and ICP development projects; identifying new customer segments, defining the company's product value proposition, and successfully executing launch and GTM plans.

A combination of these efforts resulted in a 3x website traffic increase, 16x increase in leads generated over a 2y period and $10+M in the new sales pipeline, and contributed to the consistent +70% revenue growth y-o-y.

Thunes

In this role I led Rapyd's global Brand, Communications and Social media strategy and execution.

Rapyd is a global Fintech-as-a-Service company that offers cloud-based access to Fintech and Payment capabilities anywhere in the world. It is the fastest way to power local payments anywhere, enabling companies to expand internationally without building complex payments infrastructure.

Rapyd

Global Head of Brand and Communications

SFA is a cross-industry non-profit initiative, designed to facilitate collaboration between all market participants and stakeholders in the FinTech ecosystem: from governments and large FIs to Fintech entrepreneurs across verticals and stages.

SFA's goal is to help its members grow their business, expand across borders, identify partnerships, hire new talent, and find solutions to issues.

Singapore FinTech Association (SFA)

Member of the Executive Committee

SFF brings together the global FinTech community to engage, connect, and collaborate on issues relating to the development of financial services, public policy, and technology. As the world’s most impactful FinTech festival, last year’s edition brought together over 70,000 participants from 134 countries. 

Learn more https://www.fintechfestival.sg/

Singapore FinTech Festival

SFF Ambassador

As a Marketing Director responsible for the Asia Pacific region, I single-handedly led all elements of the Marketing & Comms within the region: Digital Marketing and Lead Generation, PR, Event Management, Content creation, Country launch planning and Sales enablement. 

I also doubled as a Rapyd's global Social Media lead.

Marketing Director, APAC

Grab is Southeast Asia's leading SuperApp. Founded in 2012 as a ride-hailing company, it now operates across 8 main markets in Southeast Asia, has over 180m app downloads and offers multiple services. 

I joined the company in 2016 and throughout my 26 months Grab journey supported multiple business lines: Transport, Payments (GrabPay), Loyalty (GrabRewards), Food delivery (GrabFood) and New Business Verticals.

As a Regional Partner Marketing lead, I analyzed the opportunities for potential partnerships and alliances, developed marketing strategies, accelerating business growth for various business verticals, negotiated deals and launched numerous Regional Marketing Campaigns across Southeast Asia. 

I led a multi-talented team that worked with Grab’s Strategic Partners as Marketing Consultants, helping both Grab and partner businesses achieve their goals, grow customer base and provide better and more engaging services to Grab users. 

Portfolio of Marketing partnerships that I originated and was responsible for comprised of three main buckets: 

1. Payment partners: Mastercard, Visa, American Express, PayPal, Citibank, Standard Chartered Bank etc. 
2. Travel partners: Singapore Airlines, Booking.com, Agoda, international hotel groups etc.
3. Lifestyle partners: Disney, LiveUp, Spotify, LaLiga, UEFA Champions League, TripAdvisor,  Universal, Red Cross, WWF, Unicef, One Championship, Tinder and many others.

Grab

Regional Head of Partner Marketing

I worked on enhancing Visa’s value proposition and exposure of new features to the Fintech and Banking community across APAC. 

I drove thought leadership and education on Visa Innovation Center's capabilities and was responsible for creating awareness about them across a variety of channels: from internal communication and client-facing assets such as case studies, to industry events and conferences, social media and direct marketing campaigns.

I led Visa Innovation Centre's events & community initiatives: identifying opportunities, working on speakers, agenda and operations, and facilitating events.

I was evangelizing Design thinking principles across the organization and beyond, participating in co-creation sessions, sharing best practices and developing new ways to engage partners.

Visa

Marketing & Communications Director, Innovation Center

Partner & Product Marketing role combining B2C and B2B exposure, with responsibility for Visa's largest merchant partners, 4 product categories, people management functions and control over a $5m+ budget.

Director, Partner & Innovations Marketing, Russia

Skills: Financial Services · Business-to-Business (B2B)

Contactless & Partner Marketing manager

• Delivered double-digit revenue growth from accounts by increasing efficiency of clients businesses through portfolio optimization, risk management, customer segmentation and marketing activities
• Negotiated an exclusive deal with one of the top Russian Private Banks by developing an exclusively customized product
• Implemented 6 new product launches in the accounts under management

Business Development manager

•	Acted as a dedicated marketing consultant for Visa’s top-50 Clients (Global and Local retail banks). 
•	Delivered and executed bespoke campaigns, helping Clients to improve their performance and achieve targets. 
•	Led national marketing campaigns with the participation of 100+ Banks. 
•	Implemented digital and CRM projects. 
•	Tracked campaign performance and ROI.

Marketing Manager

VTB24 was one of Top-3 Russian retail Banks. 

As a Debit & Credit Cards project lead, I planned and ran all marketing activities related to card products.

• Relaunched the full range of retail products, contributing to the 4.5x growth of clients portfolio (1.5m in 2007 to 6.7m clients in 2009).
• Shaped and executed Marketing strategy for all card-related communication: defining value propositions, card design, designing the customers onboarding journey and collaterals, producing and launching national marketing campaigns. 
• Launched new product lines across all segments: from Debit / Payroll cards to Ultra-Premium and Private Banking products.

VTB24

Cards Brand manager

Russian Standard Bank is a leading retail bank in Russia, and one of the pioneers of credit card issuing and merchant acquiring. To date, the bank has issued over 46 million credit cards.

In my role, I helped plan nationwide campaigns across both traditional and new media, coordinate media agencies, and oversee a $25 million media budget (the largest of any Russian retail bank at the time), with the goal of driving awareness and customer acquisition for credit cards and loan portfolio of the bank. I was also responsible for coordinating a team of 20+ regional advertising managers across Russia.

Irina Chuchkina