Katherine Chan Named Rising Fintech Star of the Year at the Fintech Awards London 2026

Last night at the Fintech Awards London 2026, our CEO Katherine Chan was named Rising Fintech Star of the Year. The recognition reflects her leadership at Juice and across the wider UK fintech community.

What Katherine has focused on

Katherine's career has been built around a single question: how to make business funding more accessible for UK SMEs. It is a question UK fintech has been trying to answer for years, with mixed results. Most of the work has gone into making applications faster and decisions quicker. The harder work, the structural shift that lets more businesses qualify in the first place, has moved more slowly.

Katherine leads Juice with values that are still rare in financial services: inclusive teams and a product designed for the businesses banks haven't always served well. The way she has built the company reflects what she believes finance should look like.

What the room reflected

The Fintech Awards London brings together the wider UK fintech community for one night each year, and last night was a reminder of what makes this country's fintech scene one of the most concentrated globally. The room was full of people working on payments, lending, identity, regtech, wealth, and dozens of categories the average SME owner has never heard of and yet depends on every day.

What stood out to us was how much of that work is quiet. The unglamorous problems, like making something fairer or more accessible to the people who need it, get less coverage than the headline launches, but they are where most of the real progress is happening.

Why this matters to Juice

Juice was built to close a specific gap. Too many UK SMEs still can't access the funding they need with the clarity they deserve. Our recent research, Blind the Gap, looks at what is driving that gap and what it takes to close it.

Smart Growth Capital was built for the businesses caught in it. We have built a revolving credit facility that flexes with how a business trades, underwritten on real-time data rather than stale credit history, with transparent terms in front of the founder before they sign. Funding that gives business owners more clarity, more control, and more confidence in how they grow.

What comes next

A win like this is a moment, then it is back to work. The SME funding gap is still measured at around £22 billion, by the British Business Bank's estimate. The product still has rooms to improve, and there are still business owners who deserve better than what they are being offered. The work continues.

Thank you to Fintech Awards London for putting on a night that celebrated the people behind this industry. And thank you to our team, our partners, and the business owners we get to do this work with every day.

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