José Maria Rego

Entrepreneur and Co-founder, Raize

José Rego is the co-founder of Raize, Portugal’s largest peer-to-peer lender, which sources and invests in thousands of national SMEs. Raize currently works with more than 11,000 retail and institutional investors and is expected to invest more than €50 million by 2018. José is also a board member of an EU regulated-payments institution and a regular guest speaker at universities, business conferences and entrepreneurship events. He previously worked at Oliver Wyman in London specialising in bank restructuring and public policy. During this time, he worked on a number of high-level projects with major financial institutions and authorities across Europe. José is one of the co-founders of non-profit organisation “Acredita Portugal”, which runs one of the largest entrepreneurship competitions in the world. José currently lives in Lisbon but has worked in London, Paris and Madrid. He speaks fluent Portuguese, English, French, German and Spanish. In his spare time José runs marathons.