Ex-Funding Circle chief risk officer joins Australian fintech Cape
Former Funding Circle chief risk officer Rahul Pakrashi has joined Cape, an Australian fintech looking to reinvent the corporate credit card.
Pakrashi, who also held the chief risk officer role at UK business finance provider MarketFinance, will take on the same position at Cape, leading the firm’s risk function and future business credit line products ahead of its upcoming launch.
“Given the impact of the pandemic, there’s never been a more pressing time to support small business owners in accessing much needed working capital,” said Pakrashi.
“Having started my career in the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) modelling team of American Express and then spending six years building Discover Financial Services Business Credit Card offering in the USA, I’m excited to join the Cape team right at the start of their journey, whilst getting the opportunity to get back to my roots with building a card proposition and bringing what I’ve learnt from embedding machine learning into alternative finance products to improve customer outcomes over the past decade.”
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Pakrashi has extensive experience in the fintech sector.
He joined Funding Circle in 2012 as the peer-to-peer lending platform’s first risk hire. He scaled the department to 30 people over a six-year period and expanded their lending operations across the UK, Europe and the US.
He worked at MarketFinance from 2019 to 2020, where he oversaw the integration and management of the Barclays Bank partnership, whereby the fintech’s products were provided to the bank’s SME customer base.
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Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, former managing director at business finance aggregator Funding Options, Edo Omoniyi, formerly of consultancy 11:FS and Steve Martin, who was Funding Circle’s first in-house engineer, are the three founders of Cape.
“As we gear up to launch, building out our risk framework and resilience is key,” said Edwards-Pritchard. “With decades of experience in the sector and an outstanding track record, Rahul’s appointment is a major coup in our continued mission to re-imagine the corporate card to make credit safe and honest, so that our customers can achieve more financial flexibility and peace of mind.”
Cape’s corporate card will provide open banking tools to help firms better manage their cash flow whilst accessing finance to invest in their growth.
It will feature live credit file management, performance forecasts, a buy now pay later option and flexible access to credit with repayments linked to revenue.
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