Gregory Keough is an American entrepreneur, investor and author who has built companies across five successive waves of financial technology, and who served as a covert operations officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where he received the Intelligence Star for extraordinary heroism under conditions of grave risk.
He built and sold three companies before 2003. The Washington Post, reporting the last of them in January 2002, described AperServ Technologies as “the third company established and sold by brothers Greg and Tim Keough,” after Virtual Loan Corp., an online mortgage broker, and ZonaFinanciera.com.
The first, Virtual Loan Corp., was acquired by Realtor.com.
ZonaFinanciera was founded in a basement in December 1997 and grew to nine offices across Latin America, serving eighteen countries. Researchers at UC Berkeley later counted it as one of the three major Latin American finance sites.
In 2000 it closed a $30 million financing round with Citigroup, The Washington Post Company, Hartford Life and Capital Investors. That September Citibank signed a five-year agreement under which ZonaFinanciera would provide the technology and content to run Citibank’s internet services for Latin America, and Citibank would offer its own products on ZonaFinanciera’s site. Similar agreements followed with AIG and Mexico’s Banorte. Keough was chairman and co-founder, and had been its chief executive.
AperServ Technologies, launched in March 2000 with backing from Lycos Ventures, Walker Ventures and the Maryland Angels Council, was acquired by Response Networks in January 2002.
He founded RegaloCard in 2009, which let workers send twenty-five dollars home instantly, a decade before that was ordinary. Mastercard and Telefónica appointed him chief executive of their mobile financial services joint venture across twelve Latin American countries in 2013. He co-founded Finova Financial in 2015, named to the KPMG Fintech100; the company was named US Firm of the Year for Lending Innovation in Finance Monthly’s 2017 Fintech Awards, and Keough was named Gamechanger of the Year by ACQ Global the same year. In February 2020 a company he co-founded published the white paper that described what the industry now calls real-world assets.
Ask him what the work was for and the answer is not on the résumé. He puts faith and family first, and says so plainly, a marriage of thirty years, five children, daily mass, and a settled conviction that the institution worth defending is the one at your own table.
He wrote a book about it. The Cowboy In You is a survival manual he wrote for his children, ten lessons on faith, family, resilience and freedom, mortality, fortitude, enterprise, marriage, community, and finding some joy in not knowing what happens next. Its argument is narrower than it sounds and much harder to do: “You don’t fix the world. You fix your family.” He gives it away free.
It has been a life of extremes, and he does not describe it as anything else. He lives in El Salvador with his wife and their five children.
Sources: Forbes, 17 May 1999 · The Washington Post, 14 May 2000 · Sun-Sentinel, 21 September 2000 · The Washington Post, 23 July 2001 · The Washington Post, 10 January 2002 · Curry, Contreras & Kenney, UC Berkeley BRIE Working Paper 159, June 2004 · American Banker, 16 March 2010 · Telecompaper, 5 February 2013 · KPMG & H2 Ventures 2016 Fintech100