Fronted co-founder Simon Vans-Colina exits for Singapore

The fintech veteran will be joining another challenger bank, following his experience in the early days of Monzo Bank and founding Fronted three years ago.

Simon Vans-Colina, chief technology officer of Fronted and an early Monzo employee, is departing the company he co-founded for a new job in Singapore.

Vans-Colina, who is joining BigPay, a fintech offering a free payments app, is leaving the UK after a decade in London. Much of it spent working in the UK fintech space.

Fronted was founded in December 2019 and with the goal of helping the UK’s renters with their housing deposits by offering credit to spread the cost.

It last raised cash in May 2021 with a ​​£1m round from the Monzo ‘mafia’, a number of early employees at the neobank.

Fronted’s lead engineer Jonathan Kim is taking over as CTO while Vans-Colina said in a post on social media that he would be staying on as ‘founder adviser’.

BipgPay is part owned by Capital A, the recently rebranded name of the AirAsia Group, a Malaysian airline. It recently received a $100m investment from the SK Group, South Korea's second largest conglomerate.

BigPay has ambitions to be “one of the largest challenger banks in Southeast Asia,” according to its co-founder and CEO Salim Dhanani.