UK fintech Pockit recruits founder of Burger King Kazakhstan
A top British fintech has hired the founder of Burger King’s Kazakhstan franchise in an eye-catching board appointment.
The Cardiff-based business, which offers prepaid accounts to customers without a credit score, has recruited Kazakh businessman Anuar Utemuratov to become a director, according to company filings seen by City PM.
Utemuratov worked as an analyst for JP Morgan before launching the Burger King franchise in 2012. He grew the group to an empire of more than 50 restaurants across Kazakhstan before selling it to Holten Group, the owners of Pepsi Uzbekistan, in 2025.
He is the son of Kazakh billionaire Bulat Utemuratov, one of the country’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth of $5.4bn (£4bn) according to Forbes.
Bulat Utemuratov built his fortune as one of the founders of Kazakh-based ATF Bank, which was sold to Unicredit in 2007 in a $2.3bn deal. Unicredit later sold the firm back to a local Kazakh businessman for a fraction of the purchase price after it suffered hundreds of millions in bad debt and goodwill impairments.
Pockit partners with Spanish railway architect
The hire adds Utemuratov to a string of unusual backers of Pockit after it secured debt finance from an award-winning Spanish railway architect.
The firm signed a debenture agreement with Anchorgate Management, a British Virgin Islands company controlled by architect Santiago Calatrava, company filings show.
Calatrava, one of the best-known architects in Spain, is the designer behind some of Europe’s most iconic modern railway stations, including Liège-Guillemins station in Belgium, Lyon Saint-Exupéry TGV station in France, Lisboa Gare do Oriente station in Portugal and the Zürich Stadelhofen station in Switzerland.
Pockit also counts the likes of former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson and Revolut chair Martin Gilbert among its largest shareholders.
Founded in 2014, Pockit raised a $10m (£7.4m) funding round in 2023 to support the growth of its user base. The firm snapped up struggling fintech Monese in 2024 to bolster its tech offering.
Founder Virraj Jatania has said Pockit focuses on the “bottom half” of UK adults – some 20m to 22m people – who are often poorly served by mainstream financial services.
Jatania said most of Pockit’s users are those experiencing “cashflow volatility” – mainly blue collar workers, those in the gig economy and freelancers with sporadic incomes, as well as those with non-existent or thin credit records who find it difficult to open accounts with high street banks.