By Oliver Smith on Friday 4 October 2019
Funding Options also added Cureton along with its CFO and CMO to the board.
Small business finance broker Funding Options this afternoon confirmed AltFi’s report from 19 September that Commercial Director Simon Cureton has been appointed as interim CEO.
The news comes after former CEO and Founder Conrad Ford stepped down last month, and was joined today by the announcement that Funding Options will be expanding its services offering going forward.
“As a business services provider there's a huge cross-sell opportunity,” Cureton told AltFi in his first public comments since being appointed.
“Right now we're really running lending and lending-as-a-service, with people like GoCompare, as we expand that we're going to cross-sell more.”
“We've started doing credit cards we're going to move into other financial products and other business services that make sense.”
Funding Options said that, despite Cureton’s title as interim CEO, the board is “not actively searching” for a CEO.
Cureton told AltFi that “at some point in 2020” Funding Options is planning to do its Series B fundraise, and pointed to a recent report where chairman Nick Ogden floated a figure of £15-20m for the raise.
“We've got some pretty solid ambitions,” said Cureton. “We've stipulated that we'll have 50,000 customers connected to us via Open Banking before the end of 2022, so clearly, there's a massive push to drive through our Open Banking agenda.”
Along with Cureton, Funding Options also announced that Chief Financial Officer Donald McIntosh and Chief Marketing Officer David Keene will both sit on the company’s board going forward.
Funding Options also said that a “small number” of employees from its brokerage and sales teams are being let go as part of today’s appointments, the company described the number of departures as being “single digits” and the reasoning as "performance-driven".
21 March 2023
Daniel Lanyon