P2P financing platform Funding Societies, announced today, key additions to its executive team including former GoBear Co-Founder, Frank Stevenaar as its first Chief Financial Officer.
Frank will be overseeing Funding Societies’ finance operations, boosting its fundraising efforts, and strengthening its shareholder engagement. He has 20 years of experience in financial services where he was one of the co-founders who launched the financial services platform, GoBear, in 2015 in Singapore and Thailand. In his past role, he was responsible for developing its finance team and expanded the company across Southeast Asia.
In addition, Nihit Nirmal takes on the role as Chief Product Officer while Ishan Agrawal has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer.
Nihit Nirmal joined Funding Societies as Chief Product Officer late last year and is responsible for product management, product design, and driving the company’s digital growth. He comes with 15 years of experience in technology with his last assignment at Fullerton-backed LendingKart, an Indian digital lending platform, where he was Senior VP and Head of Product Management and Growth. His experience in digital lending has been critical to Funding Societies’ next phase of growth across new Southeast Asian markets.
Ishan Agrawal, who was Funding Societies’ VP of Engineering for two years, had earlier this year risen up to take the position of Chief Technology Officer. As the CTO, Ishan oversees Engineering, QA, DevOps, Information Security and the firm’s IT teams, driving the business through building secure and scalable technology. Prior to this, the Stanford University and National University of Singapore graduate served as its Head of Data.
Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and Group CEO said,
Kelvin Teo
“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.”
After five years of lending across Southeast Asia, Funding Societies is said to have disbursed over S$1.6 billion in financing across more than 2.8 million loans across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
It is shortlisted for the MAS digital wholesale banking license under a consortium with AMTD, SP Group and Xiaomi. Successful applicants will be informed in the second half of this year.
Featured image: Left to Right: Nihit Nirmal (CPO), Ishan Agrawal (CTO), Frank Stevenaar (CFO)
