Nick Hughes OBE 2022 speaker

Co-founder

4RD

Biography

Nick Hughes has been at the forefront of digital innovation for over 20 years. He is the co-founder of 4R Digital, working with global partners on embedding digital finance into sustainable value chains. He previously co-founded M-KOPA, the pioneer of pay-as-you-go clean energy, where Nick led the product strategy to evolve from solar home systems to TVs, fridges, financial services and most recently smart-phones.
Nick Hughes was Global Head of Payment Solutions at Vodafone Group, where, in 2003, he started and led the team that built the ground-breaking mobile payment service M-PESA, delivering it across multiple Vodafone territories reaching tens of millions of customers. Nick Hughes is a founding Board member of bKash, Bangladesh’s leading mobile money service. He is an Executive Fellow at London Business School working on digital innovation.

Nick Hughes has a PhD in Applied Science and an MBA from London Business School. He won The Economist’s Innovation Award for his work on M-PESA. In 2017 Nick was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for services to ‘innovation in Africa’.