Flutterwave hires ex-American Express and ex-Goldman Sachs as new CFO and CTO

Between 14 June and 30 June, 2022, Flutterwave has made significant appointments in its management team.

The fintech startup hired Oneal Bhambani, who was American Express' Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Capital Markets at Kabbage to lead its financial team. Former Kabbage Controller, Rebecca Mendel, and former Kabbage Head of Treasury and Tax, Daniel Eidson, have also joined the company and will report directly to Oneal.

"I am excited to welcome Oneal to Flutterwave. His track record of operating finance to enable scale and innovation with listed company standard financial controls will help us accelerate our growth as we continue to meet the needs of our expanding global customer base.  I am also looking forward to working with Oneal on deal-related initiatives, given the number of inorganic opportunities we are seeing in today’s market environment." Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Founder and CEO of Flutterwave, said.

Following its $250 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at over $3 billion—the most valuable African tech startup, Flutterwave is going through a period of rapid growth. "As Chief Financial officer, Oneal will serve a key function in enabling the company’s expansion with best-in-class discipline, operational controls and financial rigour," Flutterwave stated.

Oneal appointment is coming a few months after the fintech company was accused of financial misconduct. An analyst said that "the appointment is so necessary as most of the issues raised in the scandal were financial and an experienced CFO would have prevented or at least controlled the issues better."

More recently, Flutterwave has announced the appointment of Gurbhej Dhillon as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). "As the new CTO, Gurbhej will be responsible for further development of Flutterwave’s innovative technology platform which currently supports integrations with key technology partners like VISA, Mastercard, Discover Card Networks, and customers like Uber, Flywire, Booking.com etc." a statement from Flutterwave seen by Benjamindada.com reads.

Also Read: What two African CTOs learnt from building engineering teams.

In February 2022, Flutterwave introduced a series of new products and services, including Fintech-as-a-Service, Capital, Grow and Card issuing, that would take the technology beyond payments. The fintech made improvements to existing products, such as a new dashboard, Barter v4, and an AI-powered compliance process. GB who was previously a CTO at the company said that "Gurbhej’s experience and deep expertise in developing financial technology platforms will be instrumental in Flutterwave’s further growth."

Gurbhej joins Flutterwave from Marcus by Goldman Sachs, where he was the CTO and Head of Lending Engineering. He has extensive experience in enterprise application architecture across financial services and consumer businesses. At Marcus, he was responsible for launching platforms to significantly grow businesses while improving customer experience and established strategic partnerships with several Fortune 500 companies.

Prior to that, Gurbhej was CTO for Goldman Sachs’ Investment Banking Capital Markets team, responsible for the design, architecture, and build-out of strategic platforms that enabled clients to execute equity and debt product offerings.