Murphy names ex-Revolut product chief CPO to scale AI debt agents

Barcelona fintech Murphy is deploying AI voice agents across 34 banks in 15 countries, outperforming human collectors in controlled trials.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Fri, 13 November 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A brightly lit conference room features a long wooden table surrounded by gray chairs, with a large whiteboard, a wall clock, and a tablet in the foreground.

Murphy, the Barcelona-based startup deploying AI agents to automate banking back-office work, has appointed Dmitry Zlokazov as co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Zlokazov previously served as Global Head of Product and Head of Retail at Revolut, where he oversaw the consumer product roadmap at one of Europe's most heavily scaled neobanks. His arrival signals that Murphy is moving from proof-of-concept into a broader platform play across the credit servicing lifecycle.

The appointment follows a $15m raise backed by Northzone, Lakestar, Seedcamp and, notably, ElevenLabs, the voice AI infrastructure company whose involvement points to the depth of the audio-realism technology underpinning Murphy's agents. The company says its voice agents are already live with 34 banks and lenders across 15 countries, spanning European and Latin American markets.

AI agents outperform human collectors in A/B tests

Murphy's initial beachhead is debt collection, a function banks have historically outsourced to third-party call centres at significant cost and compliance risk. In controlled A/B tests run directly against banks' own collections teams, Murphy's agents reportedly recovered 3 to 4 percentage points more outstanding debt than human agents, with the company claiming zero compliance incidents across deployments. The recovery-rate differential, if consistently reproducible at scale, represents material uplift for lenders whose non-performing loan ratios are under pressure across both European and emerging-market portfolios.

Zlokazov's rationale for the move is direct. "Building a voice agent that handles the happy path is easy," he said. "What banks need is an AI workforce they can rely on: compliant on every call, built into their own processes, and sounding like a real person. That's the platform we've built, and it's already proving itself in enterprise deployments."

The CPO role is explicitly framed as a scale-up mandate: Zlokazov joins alongside Borja Solé, formerly of Y Combinator, and Marc Sanchez, formerly of Twilio, to extend Murphy's product across the wider credit servicing funnel beyond first-contact collections.

The agentic workforce arriving in regulated finance

Murphy's trajectory illustrates a broader pattern that is now accelerating across financial services. Where the first wave of fintech automation targeted payments and onboarding, the second wave is reaching into operations that carry regulatory liability: collections, credit restructuring, and customer-in-arrears management. These are precisely the processes that incumbent banks have been slowest to touch with automation, partly because the compliance exposure of a mis-phrased call is non-trivial under consumer-credit regulation in both the EU and UK.

The convergence angle for cross-sector investors is threefold. First, the voice-AI infrastructure layer, represented here by ElevenLabs' involvement as a backer, is becoming a direct input into regulated financial operations rather than merely a consumer product feature. Second, the talent pipeline flowing from scaled neobanks such as Revolut into AI-native startups is compressing the time it takes those startups to reach enterprise deployability: Zlokazov brings not just product instinct but direct knowledge of the operational constraints that large-volume banking creates. Third, the multi-geography footprint Murphy already holds, covering offices in London, Dubai, São Paulo and Mexico City alongside Barcelona, positions the company to benefit from divergent regulatory timelines. Latin American lenders, operating in markets where collections infrastructure is less mature and digital-first banking is growing rapidly, may prove faster early adopters than their more cautious European counterparts, giving Murphy a revenue base from which to satisfy the compliance bar required for deeper European deployment.

For capital allocators watching the agentic-AI wave, Murphy is an early data point on whether AI agents can genuinely displace human labour in a regulated, liability-bearing financial workflow rather than merely augmenting it.