SurePay appoints Robert Soetens as Chief Product Officer

Alongside this appointment, SurePay co-founder Marcel Rienties takes on the newly created role of Chief Innovation Officer. Rienties will focus on where fraud goes next, Soetens on the platform that meets it.

David-Jan Janse, CEO, said: “Verification stops a payment reaching the wrong account. What customers need now is to know whether the payee should be trusted at all and that is what we are building towards, spotting malicious payees before money moves and sharing what we see back with our community. We built SurePay around a simple idea, that a payment should always reach the right person, first time. Robert is the right leader to take that from national schemes to a global network. We’re thrilled to welcome him to the team.”

Robert Soetens said: “What drew me to SurePay was the strength of the foundation already in place, a unique network and data position that very few fraud prevention companies have. That is a rare thing to inherit, and it means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to grow, we just have to build on what’s here the right way. My focus now is turning that network into something smarter. It sees payment behaviour that no single institution can see on its own, and our platform turns that into risk signals banks can act on. The ambition is simple. Stop fraud before money moves.”

Soetens joins at a point of rising pressure across the payments industry. According to the UK Finance’s 2026 Annual Fraud Report, payment fraud losses across the UK banking sector reached £1.28 billion in 2025, up 4% year-over-year. Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, where victims are manipulated into paying criminals themselves, rose 19% to £576.4 million, with case volumes up 7% to 248,070. Industry estimates suggest roughly eight people are defrauded every minute in the UK alone.

Soetens joins SurePay from Backbase, the digital banking platform company, where he spent seven years at the company in senior product leadership roles, most recently as Vice President of Product.