Career biography:

Stephanie Pagni joined Monzo from Barclays as Group General Counsel and Co Sec at the start of 2021. In the last 12 months, Pagni has taken on an expanded executive role at Monzo as Chief Administrative Officer in addition to acting as Monzo’s Group Chief Legal Officer. This recognises her significant strategic contribution to all aspects of Monzo’s growth and expansion and public policy engagement as well as safeguarding its interests as it seeks to achieve its global ambitions.

In her role, Pagni provides strategic partnership and virtual executive leadership to the various partner teams and domains within the Monzo Group with responsibility for group structuring and regulatory strategic planning, including strategy, finance, tax, treasury, risk, operations, people and investor relations, to facilitate the delivery of Monzoʼs global ambitions through its expansion strategy in a business solution-oriented, structurally efficient and compliant manner.

The teams under Pagni’s leadership work particularly closely in customer-aligned squads with our business colleagues in product, engineering, data and design. In addition, we partner and collaborate closely with other key functions such as risk and compliance. Working collaboratively like this has allowed us to support Monzo’s growth and, in just the past year, we’ve been able to support Monzo’s entry into whole new markets like business lending, pensions and under 16 accounts. We’ve done all this while at the same time evolving the products we have, like Flex credit cards, to better meet our customers’ needs. We measure our impact in terms of our customer centricity satisfaction, organisational net promoter scores (which demonstrate high levels of customer engagement) as well as through internal feedback and outcomes-based surveys. These also consistently rate Monzo’s simplicity of understanding, accessibility and tone of voice as key to Monzo’s success of which the team plays an important role in ensuring jargon-free customer copy and T&Cs in all our product launches.

The team also plays a lead role in corporate governance and strategy. We have shaped our group structure to allow Monzo to meet the needs of customers everywhere, not just here in the UK. The team includes specialists in corporate, commercial, employment, regulatory and product law and we are perfectly placed to prepare Monzo for its continued growth in the UK and its international expansion.

As the team under Pagni also leads regulatory policy, government relations and Board governance, as well as acting as strategic legal advisers to the Group as a whole, the team has close involvement in shaping and providing insights to key legislative changes. The team helps policy-makers and lawmakers stay close to the voice of the customer in understanding where legislative changes may be required in customers best interests (where these may not have kept pace with digitalisation) or where Monzo can provide a unique perspective given its approach to co-creation of its products, features and solution with its community base.

Pagni has over 25 years’ industry experience, having worked across retail, commercial and investment banking. Having worked for magic circle firm Allen & Overy Shearman, she moved to Barclays in 2005 and spent 15 years there holding positions as Global Head of Litigation & Enforcement (where she was sole in house contributor to a leading practitioners Guide to Global investigations. Prior to Allen & Overy, she also held roles at Credit Suisse International and Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets.

Whilst at Barclays, she also held the role of UK General Counsel (setting up Barclays ring fenced bank and delivered Open Finance) as well as Chief Legal Counsel for Global Consumer Banking working with Ashok Vaswani before joining Monzo in 2021. At Barclays, Pagni pioneered the LawTech lab, driving technological innovation in the legal financial services industries by seeding lawtech start-ups and providing them with support.

On top of her executive leadership role at Monzo advising and partnering the executive and Board, Pagni is also a Board director and Board committee Chair on the Board of SP Jain London Business school, an tech-first inclusive business school which is trailblazing AI use cases to democratise and make education more accessible for all.

Pagni has also acted as a policy advisor, influencing important policy change and discussions with His Majesty’s Treasury and elsewhere, championing the legislative environment promoting fintech growth.

Pagni has also been a participant for 2020-2023 on the Ministry of Justice (for the Lord Chancellor) on the Honorary KC judging panel representing the voice of industry on this important selection panel.

Achievements and successes of the past 12 months

Over the past 12 months, Pagni has worked with a wide range of teams across Monzo to develop innovative products that are regulatory compliant and have been designed to allow customers to take control of their financial lives.

In January 2025, Monzo launched The Monzo 1p Savings Challenge, which allowed customers to start saving with as little as a penny on their first day, increasing by a penny each day thereafter. This passive method of saving allows customers to save up to £667.95 per year. Pagni and the team advised on the simple and delightful customer experience of these products and the terms and conditions for other incentives to encourage savings behaviour, like prize draws.

Pagni and her team continue to support Monzo’s Business Banking division, which now has over 600,000 customers and was awarded the most recommended business banking provider for overall service quality for the last 2 years. Pagni has provided support in a range of Business Banking launches such as Monzo Business Team in October.

Pagni also supported the launch of ground-breaking new features to help customers stay in control of their money such as the gambling block extension and new controls like ‘Monzo call status’ and ‘Added Security’ to help protect customers from fraudsters (as widely reported in the media). Stephanie and the team helped to build a product that is simple to use, while still meeting the high standards expected by our regulators.

Selected Corporate Projects:

Pagni, and the wider corporate legal team, advised the company on a high-profile funding round of approximately £500m, led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund and with participation from top-tier global tech investors like GV (Google Ventures) and HSG (HongShan Capital), along with existing investors including Passion Capital and Tencent. The round was one of the largest fintech rounds in Europe/UK during that period, and elevated Monzo’s post-money valuation to $5bn (£4bn).

Pagni and her team also closed a secondary share sale in December 2024. This allowed staff to sell a portion of their employee share options and secured a further increased valuation of $5.6bn (£4.5bn). Investors included existing backers StepStone Group and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. The success of this high-profile secondary transaction is a huge endorsement of everything that Monzo has achieved to date.

Selected Sustainability and Regulatory Projects

Pagni also leads Monzo’s sustainability strategy, regulatory policy and government relations activities and corporate governance. This includes driving Monzo’s commitments to reach Net Zero by 2030 and other carbon footprint measurement and reduction efforts. Stephanie and her team have partnered with a wide range of teams across the business to create progressive people policies such as a dedicated fertility leave and early introduction of neonatal care leave, while also ensuring Monzo meets and exceeds their Board diversity targets. She also led on key regulatory policy initiatives, such as customer accessibility, understanding and vulnerability, which advances Monzo’s mission to make money work for everyone.

Pagni is also the executive sponsor of Monzo’s Women’s Network upholding Monzo’s highly inclusive and progressive people organisation.