Cape, the expense management platform, hires former Capital On Tap CTO and Cashplus exec as CPMO

Julian and Andrew’s appointments bolster the already strong and experienced Executive Team at Cape of Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, Chief Executive, Tanya Ward, Chief Financial and Operations Officer and Rahul Pakrashi, Chief Risk Officer.

Julian scaled the Capital On Tap engineering and development team from humble beginnings when the startup was just a couple thousand SME customers strong. He implemented a CI/CD environment which enabled daily deployments of new features and introduced Machine Learning capabilities to the fintech, with the build out of two neural networks that automated the entire customer journey. In the process he laid the foundations to allow the Business Credit Card provider to grow locally and internationally under one code base to over a 150,000 SME customers in a relatively short window, without needing to scale their customer facing operational staff.

Andrew on the other hand spent the last decade at Cashplus, a SME challenger bank also based in London, where he was responsible for the Product and Marketing functions. A core part of his focus was leading the build out of their digital product capabilities such as their mobile apps, online banking, application forms, open banking usage and integrations such as Faster Payments. He also played a significant role in scaling the portfolio to over 1.5m customers, including 100,000 SME customers acquired directly through utilizing digital performance and direct marketing strategies.

Andrew will be focussed on developing the Cape product capability into a world class platform by engaging stakeholders and drilling down into customer needs. From a marketing perspective he’ll be further optimizing the strong content strategies already initiated by the current Cape team.

Julian Guppy, Chief Technology Officer, commented:

I couldn’t be more excited or proud to be joining the Cape team. As an entrepreneur myself, I was drawn to Cape’s incredibly inspiring mission to help every business take charge of time, money and ultimately their future.

On top of a fantastic team, we’re developing some genuinely groundbreaking technology which we’re applying to a complex and important set of problems by building one secure place for all teams to spend faster, simpler and more effectively.

My vision is for Cape to be recognised as a global fintech leader with a developer centric environment and culture at its core.

Andrew Fanner, CPMO, commented:

As we know only too well, SMEs face more challenges than their larger counterparts when managing their money, from the ability to open an account in the first place, to accessing and sharing their data whether that be transactional history or receipts, and having complete control of how company funds are used by employees. Cape is on a mission to simplify all of those problems, saving businesses money and time in the process.

Having followed Cape’s journey since inception 14 months ago, I’ve been hugely impressed with the strong vision set by Ryan to build software that ensures our customers work less on expenses and more on growth, which really appealed to me.

Cape isn’t a startup you come across very often, hence I jumped at the opportunity when the CPMO role emerged.

Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, Founder & CEO, Cape, commented:

Julian and Andrew will bring a huge amount of passion, energy and experience to Cape. They know the SME fintech sector well, having spent many years closely involved in the credit and spend management product aspects of their respective businesses, as well as managing international operations.

Julian brings a wealth of experience as a CTO and founder of a number of successful startups. He therefore has the knowledge and expertise that will be pivotal for this stage of Cape’s evolution, but can also empathize first hand with what it’s like to be an SME founder as we look to launch products that help small businesses save time and money.

Andrew’s experience across Product and Growth fills two areas we needed to shore up as we get ready to scale. In particular, his product experience at Cashplus provides us with a wholly relevant playbook to deliver the early phases of our roadmap, whilst developing further unique propositions.