Funding Societies announces key management changes to prepare for post COVID-19 growth

By Edil Corneille

Singapore-based Funding Societies, Southeast Asia’s SME digital financing platform, has announced new additions to its Executive team. Frank Stevenaar joins as the FinTech’s first Chief Financial Officer, while Nihit Nirmal takes on the role as Chief Product Officer, and Ishan Agrawal is promoted to Chief Technology Officer.

This comes at a juncture where the start-up gears up for larger funding rounds and a sustained growth trajectory. Funding Societies recently raised its Series C funding round with US$40m in committed funds from existing and new investors. After expanding by 194% in 2019, the FinTech platform continues to grow cautiously in 2020 with improved financial performance. These changes in senior management help to lay the foundation for outsized recovery once the macroeconomic situation improves post-COVID-19.

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Frank Stevenaar, the new Chief Financial Officer, joins the FinTech after 20 years of experience in financial services. He is responsible for overlooking Funding Societies’ finance operations, accelerating its fundraising efforts, and strengthening its shareholder engagement. Prior to his appointment, he was one of the founders who launched financial services platform, GoBear, in 2015 in Singapore and Thailand, where he developed its Finance team and expanded the company across Southeast Asia.

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, a digital lending platform in India, where he was Senior VP and Head of Product Management and Growth. His experience in digital lending has been critical for 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 the FinTech’s Head of Data.

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Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and Group CEO said, “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 has 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.