Speaker Bio
Ryan Browne is a technology correspondent based out of CNBC’s main European bureau in London, covering the technology sector with a primary focus on corporate news in Europe.
Ryan’s beat is varied but covers a broad range of areas, including financial technology, digital policy reforms around competition and content moderation, the changing business of video games amid new ways of play like mobile and cloud-enabled gaming, and the opportunities and threats posed by powerful new AI systems like ChatGPT.
Ryan has led CNBC’s coverage of the “World’s Top Fintech Companies,” a global list of the top names in financial technology, crafted in partnership with independent data firm Statista. Ryan covered the list for CNBC on “Squawk Box Europe” and “Street Signs Europe,” as well as online.
The first iteration of the list, published in 2023, saw several major names get included, from large Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, to emerging, fast-growing upstarts like U.S.-German startup Taktile, Singapore’s StashAway, and Lithuania’s Finbee.
Ryan has long covered the cryptocurrency market, writing about the twists and turns in bitcoin’s volatile year in 2021 and the token’s price appreciation to record highs. He led a six-part series in 2022 on crypto, called “CNBC Explains: Crypto,” which sought to explain and demystify a complex, jargon-clad market.
That series saw Ryan travel to a hydrogen-powered crypto mining facility in Boden, a small town in northern Sweden, to report on efforts in the crypto space to become greener. It concluded that same year with an original video explaining the demise of once-$32 billion crypto exchange FTX and its potential contagion effects for other crypto exchanges.
During his coverage that year, Ryan notably broke the story in April 2022 on the U.K. government’s plans to bring stablecoins within the scope of existing electronic money regulations, as part of the country’s ambition to become a global crypto hub.
Ryan has been the first to break several noteworthy corporate stories within his beat, including the exit of one of the founding partners of Hoxton Ventures, an early Deliveroo backer, and the launch of a generative AI product by Mastercard.
He has also broken news of several funding rounds including the Nvidia-backed $90 million capital injection that drove much-hyped generative AI startup Synthesia to a $1 billion valuation. Ryan has reported on — and represented CNBC at — many major technology conferences, including Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Money 20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Web Summit in Lisbon, and Slush in Helsinki.
He has interviewed some major names in the technology industry, including the Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky, N26 co-CEOs Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal, Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, and former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, to name a few.