Mai Le

Co-founded SAPI to build payments-native credit that widens access to capital for businesses banks often overlook. We partner with payment platforms, marketplaces, vendors, FinTechs and neobanks to deliver payment-linked financing that repays at source, combining origination, underwriting, servicing and capital access so partners can offer fair, flexible funding. I lead credit structuring, product, partnerships and capital strategy from London and Hanoi. To date SAPI has advanced £50m+ to hundreds of small businesses, around 90% of which support immigrant- or woman-owned enterprises, and secured institutional financing to accelerate our global rollout.

The G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance (G20YEA) is a collective of organizations across the jurisdictions of the G20 that promote youth entrepreneurship as a driver of economic renewal, job creation, innovation and social change. Alliance members represent more than 500,000 young entrepreneurs. Each year, the G20 YEA brings together hundreds of the world’s top young entrepreneurs to share their ideas with the G20 leaders to catalyse global change.

Between 2018 and 2021, I decided to take a meaningful step away from an investment banking career, dedicating all my savings and time to fully embrace being a founder and bootstrapping several of my own startups and tech projects. It was a period of intense learning, marked by both gratifying successes and 'character-building' failures. Some of these ventures remarkably turned a profit, while others offered profound (and expensive) educational experiences. Each project, funded by my own capital and sweat equity, taught me invaluable lessons in perseverance, people dynamics, and the true meaning of lean operations. The gains from these early wins directly funded and fuelled the bootstrapping of SAPI in the early days, proving that sometimes, the best investment is in oneself (and a healthy dose of trial and error).

- Contributed to the Financial Institutions Financing Group, executing a diverse range of transactions including Structured Credit, Fintech Debt Financing, ABS Securitisation, Distressed Debt Asset Sales, Bank Derivatives, Balance Sheet Management, and Loan Portfolio Investments as a principal. - Early promotion, demonstrating expertise in loan origination and credit portfolio investments across various loan products, and effectively assessing financial and operational risks for a broad range of credit products such as commercial and residential mortgages, consumer credit cards, personal loans, private student loans, car leasing loans, shipping loans, SME loans, and other specialist loan portfolios. - Demonstrated strong execution skills by building and leading the entire lending process, including developing loan product concepts, establishing loan underwriting and servicing capabilities, and completing the public securitisation of the loan portfolios each year. - Extensive experience in credit deals, including Loan Asset Sales, Fintech Financing, Performing and Non-Performing Portfolio Financing, Financial Entity Purchases, ABS/RMBS Origination, and Financial Regulation Analysis.

- Developed an AI speech-to-text voice diary mobile application, successfully launched on the iOS App Store in 2016. - Won the LSE Generate Seed Funding Competition in 2016, securing grant funding for further development. - The app and overall project were acquired in May 2017.

Worked with an Edtech startup, which was later acquired by Skive, creating engaging mobile content.

- Delivered comprehensive classes on financial skills education to Year 12 students in 5 London state schools, ensuring that students received technical guidance to develop their financial literacy.