What’s Going On With Noda? Leadership Shifts & UK Expansion Rumors

tamir
Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:22:39 +0000
Reviews & Ratings, Alex Batlin, Anastasija Tenca, Dmitri Volkov, Irina Konstantinova, Lasma Kuhtarska, Michael Bystrov, Naudapay, Noda

Noda, which poses itself as a payments service provider, recently saw some leadership reshuffling. As is evident from LinkedIn, a number of senior leaders left Noda in October 2025 – including CEO Igor Loktev (one of the co-founders), CRO Michael Bystrov, COO Anastasija Tenca, and many others. What has happened to the payments company, and who really runs it now?

Noda’s Shareholders & Key People

Firstly, let’s establish Noda’s registered locations. On its website, it is stated that for the payment initiation within the UK, the company’s official name is Naudapay Limited registered in London. Meanwhile, for the tech services within the EU, it’s Noda Holdings Limited, registered in Nicosia, Cyprus.

One of the directors of the UK company NaudaPay (incorporated in 2018) was former COO Anastasija Tenca, yet in October 2025, her appointment was terminated (as is evident from LinkedIn too). Currently, the director of the UK company is Irina Konstantinova, a Latvian citizen. According to LinkedIn, she’s been in that position for seven years.

Meanwhile, Noda’s co-founder Lasma Kuhtarska – who appears to be the only person from the original team still at Noda – is stated as the person with significant control, with 75% or more ownership of shares. Previously, entrepreneur Dmitri Volkov was one of the major shareholders too, yet his control ceased in 2023.

Leadership Shifts to the UK

There are two new UK-based leadership team members – financial director Ksenia Cohen and executive advisor Alex Batlin, who recently wrote an article about what the latest AWS outage means for the payments sector.

Name | Position | Location | Previous relevant experience
Ksenia Cohen | Finance Director | UK | EY
Alex Batlin | Executive Advisor | UK | Bitpanda, UBS

There are also a few UK-based leadership jobs advertised on LinkedIn. For example, Head of Analytics, Data Analyst, AML/KYC Risk Analyst, Product Designer – which suggests Noda may be shifting more of its team to the UK. Additionally, there are rumors that the expected Managing Director will be UK-based, along with the rest of the decision-making team.

Noda’s UK address is 162 Buckingham Palace Road, which appears to be a “stylish co-working space”.

What Has Changed with Noda Product?

Are these position and location changes normal scaling adjustments or signs of deeper restructuring? Is there any disruption to the client-facing side of Noda, and what are the key changes to Noda’s product?

Noda’s offering hasn’t changed. Its products still include open banking and card payments and payouts, checkout form, no-code pages, payment links and QR codes, interactive donation buttons (Noda Prime), sign-in via bank, and data enrichment. This suggests there hasn’t been a major disruption to Noda’s product.

Noda’s open banking network covers 2,051 banks across 28 countries – 250 in Europe, and full bank coverage in the UK. In the latest LinkedIn post, Noda stated that 1.7 million new users paid with Noda in the past six months, with 60% of them returning to this payment method.

Possible Motives Behind Noda’s Restructuring

So, if nothing else has changed with the product, what were the reasons for Noda’s leadership team restructuring in October-November 2025?

As pointed out by Noda’s co-founder in the latest interview, Noda was built as an IT company, and its current competitive advantage lies in technology and accessibility. As for the future of Noda, she said that Noda will keep its focus on the UK and European payments. It’s possible that the current restructuring is strategy-lead or to refine corporate governance, yet there were no comments about this in the interview.