Moshe Kimhi, CEO and Co-Founder of Neema – Interview Series

Moshe Kimhi, CEO and Co-Founder of Neema is an experienced financial services executive with a deep background in finance, audit, and operational leadership. He has led Neema since its founding in 2018, guiding the company’s strategic direction, scaling its operations, and expanding its presence in the fintech ecosystem. Kimhi brings strong expertise in financial management, regulatory navigation, and corporate governance, with a proven ability to build high-performing teams, execute growth initiatives, and maintain strong relationships with investors, partners, and regulators. Prior to serving as CEO, he held senior finance roles, including CFO positions, where he oversaw budgeting, financial operations, reporting, compliance, and cash management in fast-growing organizations.

Neema is a financial technology company focused on simplifying global money movement and expanding access to modern financial services. Its digital platform enables individuals and businesses to send and receive funds internationally, manage multi-currency accounts, pay bills, and access card-based services, while its global payments infrastructure supports banks and financial institutions with efficient cross-border transfers across multiple rails. By combining consumer-friendly financial tools with enterprise-grade payments technology, Neema aims to reduce friction in international transactions and improve financial inclusion at scale.

You began your career in highly structured financial environments — from PwC audits to managing complex financial operations at major organizations. How did those early experiences shape your worldview and ultimately inspire you to build a fintech company of your own?

My background in traditional finance exposed me to the limitations of legacy systems. I saw firsthand how slow, rigid, and manual many financial processes still were. That contrast between what existed and what should exist is what eventually pushed me toward building a fintech company. The frustration I saw every day, combined with my understanding of compliance and accounting drove me to establish Neema and build a faster, more reliable foundation for global payments.

What was the moment when you recognized the pain points facing unbanked and migrant workers in cross-border payments, and how did that realization lead you to build Neema and eventually evolve it from a consumer solution into a full B2B and B2B2C payments platform?

The moment that changed everything was seeing my grandfather’s caregiver struggle to send money back home. What should have been simple, became stressful, expensive, and confusing. I realized this wasn’t a one-off problem, it was a global issue affecting millions.

That inspired the establishment of Neema in 2015, initially starting as a digital account that enabled end-users, specifically underserved populations and migrant workers, to conduct money transfers and other financial services in Israel and around the world, as an alternative to bank accounts.

Over time, we realized that the infrastructure we’d built to help individuals could serve larger markets including businesses and institutions. From there, we built out the foundation of our consumer account side to develop a payments platform that supports other digital wallets and aggregators across the world.

Building cross-border infrastructure requires trust, compliance, and resilience. How did your background in financial reporting, internal controls, and regulatory oversight influence the way you navigated early licensing and banking relationships?

I approached licensing not as a checkbox exercise but as a structural discipline. We built our compliance processes from day one as if we were already operating at scale.

My background also opened my eyes to the nuances of financial misconduct (whether intentional or not) and the growing sophistication of bad actors. This made it clear that our risk and compliance systems would continuously need to get stronger, smarter and more predictive with advanced capabilities, including AI, machine learning, and human expertise. For this reason, our security and compliance teams regularly work with customers, banks, and partners as part of our dedicated efforts to reduce fraud, combat money laundering, and generally make life harder for scammers.

Neema’s Dynamic Routing system represents a major shift away from legacy rails. What were the biggest technical or operational challenges in creating it, and what gap were you trying to close?

Our Dynamic Routing technology, together with Neema’s vast network of financial partners, is designed to close gaps in the speed, costs, reliability, and transparency of traditional transaction corridors that are typically singular and fixed.

To build our multi-layer decision engine to intelligently route every transaction through the best available corridor, in real time, we had to overcome a few main challenges:

• Technologically orchestrating several interoperable suppliers per corridor instead of just one
• Connecting to multiple providers and managing balances, securing good commercial terms on a business development and operational level
• Technologically ensuring each corridor is the optimal one, and making sure transactions are facilitated in real-time, in the most cost effective way

Scaling a payments platform to reach more than 120 countries and support 80+ currencies is a major undertaking. What were the most significant hurdles in building partnerships, onboarding institutions, and ensuring global coverage?

Finding the right partners was a major hurdle. We weren’t just looking for the affordable route, but also the most fast, reliable and stable one. That required deep due diligence and long-term relationship building.

Initially, we looked for infrastructure partners for our consumer-facing digital account but it turned out that in many cases, we couldn’t find the reliability we were looking for. Failure rates were high, transparency was limited, and the overall experience didn’t meet the standard we wanted for our users.

So we shifted our approach and began building a global network ourselves, connecting with financial institutions and strong regional players, and creating direct connections where needed to guarantee transactions reached their destination reliably and on time.

Another challenge was maintaining global coverage while ensuring an always-on experience. To overcome this, we built our Dynamic Routing® technology, which evaluates every available route in real-time and sends each transaction through the most reliable and efficient path. This allows us to eliminate failures, and deliver consistent performance no matter the corridor or partner infrastructure.

Serving both unbanked individuals and regulated financial institutions requires very different approaches. How did you adapt Neema’s technology, compliance model, and user experience as the company expanded into institutional use cases?

Serving unbanked individuals and regulated financial institutions may look different from the outside, but for us the foundation is the same. We built Neema around core values, financial inclusion and trust, and those values guide both our consumer products and our institutional offerings.

As we expanded to serve financial institutions, we didn’t reinvent the platform. We strengthened the same technology and compliance frameworks we were already using. The core engine stayed the same; we simply delivered it through APIs and infrastructure instead of a consumer interface.

In short, the shift wasn’t about changing who we are, it was about scaling what already worked.

From your perspective, which global payment corridors remain the most underserved today, and how is Neema positioning itself to address those segments?

Many corridors into Africa and Southeast Asia still suffer from slow settlement and unpredictable delivery. These are places where reliability matters most and where we are focussing on making an impact. Today, our platform covers over 120 countries, including more than a dozen locations respectively in both the Asia-Pacific region and in Africa. We aim to expand our network of banks, digital wallets, cards and cash pickup points in these geographies in the coming year to enable cash flows that overcome traditional challenges in these corridors of high fees, limited infrastructure, and complex regulatory hurdles.

Cross-border payments sit at the intersection of regulation, risk, and innovation. What philosophies guide your decisions when balancing speed, compliance, and reliability?

Our philosophy is simple: move fast, but never at the expense of reliability. That principle has shaped how we build everything. It’s why we created Dynamic Routing®, a technology that intelligently selects the best route for every transaction, ensuring high success rates and real-time performance across all corridors.

For us, innovation isn’t about adding features; it’s about strengthening trust. Every system we build is designed to deliver the same outcome: payments that arrive quickly and predictably, no matter where they’re going.

As a founder-CEO with a deep finance background, what leadership lessons have been most transformative as Neema scaled?

Surround yourself with people who complement your capabilities and know more than you in areas where you need their expertise. Scaling is a team achievement, not a solo act.

Another is that founders must evolve. What works with a company of five people breaks at 50. You have to continuously reinvent how you lead in order to grow and be stronger.

Looking ahead, how do you see the global money movement evolving over the next decade, and where do you see Neema positioned in that future landscape?

As cross-border payments are due to significantly rise in the coming decade alongside global commerce, I foresee that money will move like information–instantly, transparently, and without geographic barriers. The rails are already evolving to match user expectations. In the coming years, I expect that global money movements will become more like local payments, becoming as easy, fast, and cheap as domestic ones. Key to this will be increased adoption and “mainstreaming” over the coming years of contemporary API-first infrastructure that overcomes the inadequacies of legacy rails that are slow, error-prone, and costy–and not built for modern commerce.

I see Neema continuing to innovate and expand its capabilities as a leader driving new standards in shifts toward globally connectivity like: account-to-account payments, real-time optimization, routing intelligence, compliance transparency, and transaction reliability. At Neema, we plan to further forge our position as a core infrastructure provider so that regulated institutions and global partners – banks, EMIs, wallets – can plug in instantly and gain global payments coverage.

Thank you for the great interview. Readers who wish to learn more should visit Neema.