From London to Lisbon: Meet Lissele Pratt: the matchmaker of payments

Since Lissele Pratt, co-founded Capitalixe – a fintech advisory providing payment solutions, banking services, and foreign exchange for high-risk and international businesses – in 2019 with Ivan Kovachev, the advisory has achieved 7-figure revenues. Dividing her time between London and Lisbon, Essential Business caught up with the entrepreneur at Web Summit in November, 2025.

Text: Chris Graeme; Photos: Supplied

Lissele Pratt is a champion for women in finance. She knows all about glass ceilings and being dismissed and disregarded in a financial world that is still very much dominated by men.

Moving to Lisbon in 2020 at tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lissele realised she didn’t want to be in London “where everyone was miserable and complaining when I could be in sunny Lisbon”.

I ask Lissele to describe in a few words what her company Capitalixe does. “If your business operates in a challenging financial area (like online gaming or crypto) and needs to send or receive money internationally, Capitalixe connects you with financial partners such as banks and payment systems that can handle complex transactions involving multi-currency accounts and cross-border payments, acting as your guide”, she explains.

The growth of crypto

One area that the traditional financial sector is waking up to is the growing importance of crypto currencies but most banks still don’t want to deal with them.

“Banks are starting to realise that they have to get on board with crypto although traditionally labelling it and i-Gaming as high risk, mostly because of compliance difficulties and reputational risk”, she explains.

“On the compliance side there needs to be a lot of monitoring, and payments require enhanced due diligence which in turn requires more manpower and workload for these companies and the banks”, says the Fintech founder.

Lissele’s company Capitalixe picks the slack up by helping clients obtain reliable and trustworthy alternative payments and banking solutions through new fintech companies that specialise in working with high-risk industries and have the compliance technology to deal with them.

The matchmaker of payments

Lissele and Capitalixe are to the financial sector what Dolly Levi of musical ‘Hello Dolly’ was to marriage matchmaking.

The Lisbon resident who moderated two panels at Web. Summit 2025: ‘Fintech with feeling: AI beyond automation’ and ‘The stablecoin sandwich’, says: “We act as intermediaries. I like to call myself the ‘matchmaker of payments’.”

“Traditional banks operate on legacy systems. They don’t have the technology systems to deal with the workload of each of these high-risk industries, and that’s where the fintechs come in because they have specialised in these type of industries,” explains Lissele.

However, Lissele accepts that the situation is changing, with some banks open to collaborating with fintechs and “those are the ones that are going to stay ahead of the curve”.

In Portugal, for example, Millennium bcp, Caixa Geral de Depósitos and Bison Bank have developed or are developing crypto programmes, but as she says “the ones that are still operating on legacy systems risk being left behind.”

It is here that she thinks Portugal is somewhat a trailblazer compared to other European countries, although compared to the Asian and Far Eastern banks, is still light years away.

A woman in a man’s world

Lissele, a Lisbon resident and a champion for women in finance and technology, regularly speaking on global stages ((TEDx, iFX Expo, Fintech LIVE London) and Forbes Business Council contributor), actually started on her career path in compliance years ago.

“Although I started working at the age of 18 for a compliance company for three years, my full-time role in finance was as a Forex currency broker where I was making 200 cold calls a day by the age of 23.

“I was in a room of 20 men and it’s still very male dominated, particularly on the trading floor. There was definitely a glass ceiling attitude with certain guys, but a lot of guys were very helpful and I still friends with some of them to this day”, Lissele recalls.

A seven-figure company in three years

Since Lissele co-founded Capitalixe she has scaled the company to 7-figure revenues in just 3 years by the age of just 26.

Today Capitalixe has 150+ clients and 50+ payment providers worldwide on its books while Lissele personally has been recognised across the industry: ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’, ‘UK Fintech Awards’, and ‘Innovative Finance Women in Fintech Powerlist’.

Lissele is modest about her achievements and says that the most important thing was spotting an opportunity and a gap in the market, giving clients what they needed and solving their pain points.

“Technology is giving ‘excluded’ sectors like Crypto and Forex access to global finance and we literally had clients asking us to help them and that’s when we started growing”, she says.

Focusing on high-risk industries (crypto, gaming, gambling) and high-risk jurisdictions where traditional banking is difficult, Capitalixe offers global payments, banking, multi-currency IBANs, FX hedging, and seamless API integrations.

“Our business model works as a free-to-use financial advisory, only succeeding when our clients do while leveraging strong partnerships with global financial institutions. Our target are international businesses needing reliable and compliant payment infrastructure”, she adds.

Today, Capitalixe has over 100 fintech partners, 85 institutional clients, 20 years of combined experience in finance and an annual payment flow of over €1Bn.

It deals with clients in sectors such as Forex/CFD Brokers, financial, commodities, cryptocurrency exchange, money services, asset management, i-gaming, offshore banks, real estate investment, gambling and HNW and UHNW individuals.

Without mentioning specific clients, Lissele says “we’ve helped some of the world’s leading companies in their financial decisions, innovations and operational challenges related to payments and digital banking with our extensive network of partners spanning the globe, offering tailored payment solutions in virtually every jurisdiction.”

The majority of our clients are investment platforms, but also holdings clients which have “onboarded” a lot of their companies as well.

Often these holdings operate in the UK, Cyprus, Thailand, Vietnam, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, so we work with a lot of offshore entities and companies in big financial hubs”, Lissele details.

Enhanced due diligence

Lissele explains that the biggest gap in the market was C2B accounts, meaning receiving funds directly from customers, something that traditional banks prefer not to do, focusing instead on B2B payments.

“When dealing with the Russian market, for example, there’s a lot of money being laundered and you have to question when a man dressed in a suit comes in an wants to make possibly ‘cloudy’ transfers.

“With these industries you have to have enhanced due diligence and strict compliance, someone constantly monitoring, good compliance technology, and tools to cater for that and that’s what fintechs can provide.”

Lissele says that at the end of the day if compliance headaches can be solved by AI facial recognition or AI that can constantly monitor the payments that these companies are making and spot any anomalies and raise red flags for the system to review then Capitalixe through its partners has done its job.