Fintech Founder Ozan Özerk: Who He Is and What He's Really Selling

Generated Title: The Doctor Is In: Is Ozan Ozerk's Fintech Prescription a Cure-All or Just More Snake Oil?

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So, an ER doctor walks into the global financial system.

That’s not the start of a bad joke. That’s the actual resume of Dr. Ozan Ozerk, the latest prophet in the fintech world telling us all to hurry up or get left behind. After a career patching people up in emergency rooms, he's now diagnosing the ills of money itself. And his prescription, delivered from conference stages in places like Vilnius, is a heavy dose of speed, AI, and blockchain.

He stood in front of a room full of suits at the Foreign Investors Annual Summit and dropped the line that’s become his mantra: "Do nothing, and you donate advantage to your fastest competitor." It sounds profound, like something Sun Tzu would write if he were a VC. But let's translate that from keynote-speak to English: "Get on my train, or my train will run you over."

It’s the oldest trick in the tech playbook. Create the crisis, then sell the cure. And I gotta admit, the guy is compelling. He’s not some finance bro who was born on third base; he was a Norwegian Armed Forces Ranger and an actual doctor. But does stitching up wounds give you a special insight into fixing a systemically broken financial world? Or does it just make you really good at identifying symptoms while maybe, just maybe, missing the disease?

The Ten-Second Cure

Ozerk’s core diagnosis is that finance is too slow. It's a creaking, arthritic beast lumbering along while the rest of the world moves at the speed of light. His cure? "Switch on instant pay." He points to new EU rules forcing all euro transactions to clear in ten seconds. He talks about the US finally catching up with FedNow.

Great. My share of the pizza bill will now arrive in my friend's account before I’ve even put my wallet away. Revolutionary.

But let’s be real. This obsession with speed feels like putting a jet engine on a horse-drawn carriage. The fundamental structure—the one that favors the house, the one that privatizes gains and socializes losses—remains exactly the same. We’re just making the transactions within that broken system happen faster. It’s like the financial world is a giant, high-stakes drag race where everyone is bolting on new tech—AI, open data, digital IDs—to their cars. But is anyone bothering to check the brakes? Or are we just supposed to cheer as they accelerate toward the next cliff?

Ozerk says AI is a "structural revolution," not a passing phase, pointing to the hundreds of billions being poured into it. Offcourse, it is. But a revolution for whom? Will AI create a fairer, more accessible financial system, or will it just build a more efficient, automated machine for denying loans and flagging transactions based on algorithms no one understands? These are the questions that get glossed over in the rush to innovate, and we’re all just supposed to nod along...

This whole thing reminds me of my last trip to the DMV. A miserable experience, obviously. They had a new app, a new ticketing system, all this shiny tech. But I still had to wait two hours next to a guy clipping his toenails because the underlying bureaucracy was the same old mess. We’re getting the fintech version of that: a slick user interface slapped on top of a rotten foundation.

Diagnosis: 'Sleeping Giant' or Just Asleep?

Then Ozerk pivots to Türkiye, calling its banking system a "sleeping giant" with infrastructure more advanced than many European countries. As a Turkish entrepreneur himself, you expect some hometown pride. But he claims the country is on par with Japan and South Korea. It's a bold claim, one he makes in articles like ‘Sleeping giant’: Entrepreneur sees Türkiye’s fintech and banking sector as untapped global force. No, 'bold' doesn't cover it—it's a sales pitch, plain and simple. He's got his Ozan SuperApp there, after all.

Is he right? I have no idea. Maybe he is. But when a guy with a vested interest tells you a market is an untapped goldmine, you check your pockets.

His most interesting—and terrifying—idea is what he calls the "stablecoin sandwich" for foreign exchange. The idea is to convert your dollars to a stablecoin, zip it across the blockchain instantly, and convert it back to, say, euros on the other side. It cuts out the slow, expensive intermediary banks. A "massive operational win," one of his people says.

It also sounds like a fantastic way to lose a lot of money very, very quickly. Remember TerraUSD? That little stablecoin experiment that vaporized about $40 billion in a week? Who exactly is guaranteeing the "meat" in this sandwich isn't just a pile of digital IOUs backed by wishful thinking? What happens when one of these supposedly stable coins de-pegs while your billion-dollar transaction is mid-flight? It ain’t a theoretical risk. It’s a ticking time bomb.

The doctor preaches about learning from medicine—a topic he detailed in Dr Ozan Ozerk on Lessons from Medicine That Can Reshape Modern Finance—about diagnostics, ethics, and precision. But in medicine, you have the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm." I have to wonder, where is that oath in fintech?

So, What's the Verdict, Doc?

Look, I don't think Ozan Ozerk is a villain. He's smart, he's driven, and his diagnosis is mostly right: the traditional financial system is a dinosaur. But his prescription feels like a whole lot of high-tech stimulants. He’s treating the symptoms—slowness, inefficiency—with a shot of adrenaline. But the underlying disease, the systemic inequality and the built-in fragility, remains untouched. He’s not saving finance; he's just making it twitch faster. And I’m not convinced that’s a cure for anything at all.