Funding Societies, an SME digital financing platform has updated much of its executive team. According to a note from the company, Frank Stevenaar joins as the Fintech’s first Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Nihit Nirmal takes on the role as Chief Product Officer (CPO), and Ishan Agrawal has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Funding Societies says the new executives arrive at a critical point as the Fintech gears up for larger funding rounds. Funding Societies recently raised a $40 million Series C round after growing by 194% in 2019.
CFO Frank Stevenaar joins the company after 20 years of experience in financial services and M&A. Prior to Funding Societies, he was one of the founders who launched the financial services platform, GoBear – most recently he was their CFO.
Nihit Nirmal joined Funding Societies as Chief Product Officer late last year. He was previously at LendingKart, one of India’s largest digital lending platforms.
Ishan Agrawal, who was Funding Societies’ VP of Engineering for two years will now oversee engineering, QA, DevOps, information security and the firm’s IT teams, as CTO. Agrawal is a Stanford University and National University of Singapore graduate.
Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and Group CEO, commented on the management change:
“As Funding Societies matures from a FinTech startup to a FinTech firm, we have steadily built out and streamlined our business as talent is central to our organisation, both by thoughtful hiring and deliberate grooming. As we steer through COVID-19 with good relative success and are recovering to near pre-COVID results, we are cautiously optimistic about 2020, excited for 2021, and planning ahead with concerted leadership from Frank, Ishan, and Nihit.”
Funding Societies reports that it has disbursed over S$1.6 billion in financing through more than 2.8 million loans across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia during the past 5 years. Funding Societies has been shortlisted for the MAS digital wholesale banking license under a consortium with AMTD, SP Group, and Xiaomi.
