OakNorth – the digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs – today announces the further strengthening of its Board of Directors with the appointment, effective from today, of Nilan Peiris as a Non-Executive Director.

Nilan is the Chief Product Officer at Wise where he is responsible for product, design, analytics, and sales across Wise’s multiple product lines and geographies. He joined Wise in 2014 as VP Growth from a C-suite background in technology, marketing, and customer acquisition. With Wise, he has built one of the strongest product organisations in Europe. The company has become a global leader in cross-border multi-currency payments, serving over 12m people and businesses in the last financial year alone. Prior to joining the company, Nilan acted as advisor to Wise from 2012, and also served as VP Growth at HouseTrip. Outside of Wise, Nilan advises social impact startups  on their growth and product development through Daring Capital. He has a BSc Hons in Mathematics from the University of Bristol, and lectures at different institutions and industry events on marketing, product management and development, and strategy. 

Commenting on the appointment, Rishi Khosla, CEO and co-founder of OakNorth, said: “We are delighted to welcome Nilan to our Board. It is rare to find people who have experience working for an organisation as it has grown from a start-up, to scale-up, to a listed global organisation and to have supported the founder CEO throughout this growth journey. I have been deeply impressed by what Nilan has achieved at Wise and as OakNorth continues to scale, both in terms of our product offering and geographic footprint, Nilan’s breadth and depth of expertise will prove invaluable.”

Nilan Peiris, Non-Executive Director at OakNorth, continued: “I have been following OakNorth’s journey since inception and have always admired its commitment to customers, the scale of its ambition, and its unique approach to addressing one of the biggest commercial customer pain points in existence – access to credit. Having spent the last decade at Wise, these are all things I can relate to and that resonate deeply with me. As OakNorth continues to broaden its support for entrepreneurs through its business banking offering and expansion to the US, I’m excited to be part of the next phase of growth. Rishi and Joel have built an incredible business and one of the few scaling fintech unicorns that has been consistently profitable – I look forward to learning from them and my fellow Board members.”