Funding Circle appoints new VP of engineering

Funding Circle has appointed Bruno Tavares as vice president of engineering.

The Portuguese executive has previously served as sports streaming service DAZN’s head of software development as well as vice president of engineering at Elephant Healthcare.

In his 20-year career, he has also held roles at Portugal Telecom as well as at gambling firm Gamesys and has over 8 years of experience as a freelance developer 

Bruno joins Funding Circle as the platform claims it is continuing to develop its multi-product, multi-channel offering, including its short-term embedded finance solution FlexiPay.

FlexiPay allows partners to natively embed Funding Circle into their own website and allows UK businesses to spread any UK invoice over three months.

This isn’t the only recent hire that Funding Circle has made to support the development of its FlexiPay product.

In June, Funding Circle hired former Remitly and Revolut exec Jerome Fernandez to lead FlexiPay.

These hires come at a time in which Funding Circle is revaluating its business model.

The fintech permanently closed off its investment platform to new retail investors in  March 2022, after first closing it off in March 2020 when the pandemic began.

These changes did seem to pay dividends in terms of profitability.

The fintech reported its first full year of profitability in 2021, the first since it was founded in 2010, banking a cool £64m.

“I’m really excited to be welcoming Bruno to the team,” said Swati Lay, chief technology officer at Funding Circle. “As we expand the set of products that we offer to small businesses, Bruno’s experience of scaling and nurturing great engineering teams will play an invaluable part in delivering on Funding Circle’s 2024 plan.”

Funding Circle certainly isn’t the only UK fintech making big hires to support its engineering and product development efforts.

Financial API provider TrueLayer nabbed its latest chief product officer, Ossama Soliman, directly from Amazon.