Kriti Mehrotra
As a James Erskine documentary that examines the impropriety surrounding the titular German payments processing giant, ‘Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard’ is as thrilling as it is confounding. The reason — apart from the company’s financial fraud, it even delves into its mafia-like behavior, porn barons, as well as Russian intelligence connections to really get to the heart of the matter. Amongst those to feature in this Netflix original to help move the narrative along is thus none other than former Wirecard employee Martin Osterloh. So let’s find out more about him, shall we?
Who is Martin Osterloh?
Although a German native through and through, Martin had reportedly spent some of his early years in Nassau, The Bahamas, before returning to his homeland for good around the mid-1980s. He then graduated from Odenwaldschule Ober-Hambach (Odenwald School) in 1990 and made his way to attend the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt for a pure Commercial Diploma. We should mention that since Martin had already learned English in The Caribbean as well as in high school, his focus in college (1991-1996) was simply on Marketing and Computer Sciences.
Martin hence kickstarted his career as a support agent-turned-manager outsourced for Apple Computers at ICL Fujitsu, only to officially join the former under an executive title in early 2000. He actually served as Europe, Middle East, and Africa’s (EMAC’s) Customer Relations Manager for the ensuing two years, leaving just to pursue opportunities in consultancy as well as sales. Therefore, it was in 2005 that he landed a spot at Wirecard, where he quickly rose the ranks to go from Global Sales & Customer Relationship Manager to VP of Digital Sales within four years.
“When I joined in 2005, we were about 130, 150 people,” Martin candidly revealed in the documentary. “When I left Wirecard [amid the scandal in 2020], there were over 6,500 individuals.” He added that there was a lot of internal pride within this period since they were considered a pioneering fintech firm, which is why the eventual fraud allegations were initially taken as attacks rather than warnings.
“Reliving the whole experience now, I feel naive in not having seen certain things,” the former VP admitted in the Netflix original. That’s especially because COO Jan Marsalek had approached him during an office Christmas party in 2019 to suddenly state, “Martin, if you stole 100,000 from the company, I would not have respect for you. If you’re gonna steal,… you have to steal millions, hundreds of millions.”
Martin Osterloh is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Payoro
As Martin had no hand in the Wirecard scandal despite being a high-ranking executive that’d given nearly 16 years to the organization, his journey in the fintech industry continues to this day. From what we can tell, the Munich resident had moved on to work as the Sales Director at Deutsche Payment before evolving into the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Payoro in 2021 — a position he proudly holds to this day.
As if that’s not enough, Martin even freelances as a sales consultant, all the while doing his best to focus on his family and have the best of both worlds. We should mention that his overall professional specialties actually include training, optimizing payment structures, customer support, banking, project management, IT, database management, marketing, and budgeting, amongst many more.
Read More: Where is Jan Marsalek Now?
