Funding Societies hires GoBear co-founder, expands C-suite

FUNDING Societies, a digital financing platform for small and medium enterprises in South-east Asia, has named a chief financial officer (CFO), chief technology officer (CTO) and chief product officer (CPO).

In a statement on Wednesday, the Singapore-based fintech startup said these changes in senior management will help "lay the foundation for outsized recovery" once the macroeconomic situation improves after the Covid-19 outbreak.

It is preparing for larger funding rounds as it continues to "grow cautiously in 2020 with improved financial performance", Funding Societies added. The Singapore digital bank hopeful recently raised Series C funding with US$40 million in committed funds from existing and new investors.

The new CFO is Frank Stevenaar, who was co-founder and CFO of financial services platform GoBear. Mr Stevenaar, who has 20 years of experience in financial services as well as mergers and acquisitions, oversees Funding Societies' finance operations, accelerate its fundraising efforts and strengthen its shareholder engagement.

Meanwhile, the new CTO, Ishan Agrawal, was promoted to the role earlier this year from vice-president of engineering. He now oversees engineering, quality assurance, DevOps, information security and the firm's IT teams.

The new CPO, Nihit Nirmal, joined late last year and is responsible for product management, product design and driving the company's digital growth. Mr Nirmal was senior vice-president and head of product management and growth at Indian digital lending platform LendingKart.

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Funding Societies said Mr Nirmal's experience in digital lending has been "critical" for the startup's next phase of growth across new South-east Asian markets.

The peer-to-peer lending platform said it has, in the past five years, disbursed over S$1.6 billion in financing through more than 2.8 million loans across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Funding Societies co-founder and group chief executive Kelvin Teo added that the startup has steered through the Covid-19 outbreak with "relative success", and its financial results have recovered to near pre-Covid levels.

The fintech is part of a consortium led by Hong Kong's AMTD Group vying for a digital wholesale bank licence in Singapore. The other partners in the consortium are Xiaomi and Singapore utilities provider SP Group.