Fundbox, a financial platform for small businesses, has tapped Cetin Duransoy as chief operating officer.
Duransoy joins the company from Visa where he served as its head of global installment products. He oversaw developing Visa’s installment payment ecosystem that helped issuers to offer and sellers to display installment plans to customers. Before joining Visa, he worked for Capital One for 15 years holding numerous leadership roles in the credit card division and retail bank.
Fundbox’s platform is powered by artificial intelligence and aims to provide financial tools for its customers to “cover business-critical operating expenses.” Duransoy told FinLedger the company’s core product is a working capital product that “basically bridges the gap on the typical 30 to 90 day gap in [a company’s] cash flows.”
He officially started in his new role March 15, reports to the company’s CEO Prashant Fuloria, and oversees the credit, risk, direct acquisition, partner acquisition and customer operations teams.
“Fundbox is poised for rapid growth as we approach a uniquely significant opportunity, which is to support the recovery and expansion of the small business economy as COVID recedes,” said Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox in a prepared statement. “The addition of Cetin to our executive team reinforces our relentless commitment to support small businesses through fast access to trusted financial tools.”
Fundbox has also had some notable senior hires from companies spanning PayPal, Atlassian and Khosla Ventures. The company has invested over $130 million in its AI technology and data sources. Fundbox has transacted over $2 billion in loans and connected with almost 300,000 businesses.
Going forward, Duransoy said that challenges he expects are good challenges to have, which includes the growing demand the company is experiencing and prioritization.
“We have a really cool product pipeline to help our customers not only with working capital, but also in other dimensions as well. This is a challenge that I have faced throughout my career, there’s always more ideas than a company can execute on. I found the answer is to be really good at being disciplined,” he said.
Also, he sees opportunities in expanding partnerships, trying different products and different ways to help its customers in addition to growing the platform.
“The platform that Fundbox has been building has been so exciting to see how integrated it is with the whole ecosystem,” he said. “And that level of integration increases the utility of our solutions and increasing that level of integration is going to be one of the biggest opportunities.”
In other recent news, TomoCredit is using open banking through Mastercard company Finicity to offer a fast and proprietary assessment for people that don’t have credit history.