Cashplus Hires Amex Commercial Card Risk Exec

U.K. challenger FinTech Cashplus has hired a commercial card risk expert from American Express, reports this week said.

According to reports Wednesday (Sept. 18), Cashplus announced Rahul Duseja will join the company as its credit director. He comes from American Express as its head of credit risk for U.K. Commercial Cards and Payments and before working at Amex, Duseja held a position at Accenture.

In a statement, Cashplus Chief Commercial Officer Paul Schooley said Duseja’s “deep knowledge of how risk underpins performance, and his extensive [small- to medium-sized enterprises] SME experience, will be incredibly valuable as we move to accelerate our lending growth and develop new products, tailor-made for the small businesses that so often struggle to access the capital they need in order to grow.”

In another statement, Duseja said that he is “excited” to join Cashplus at a time when challenger banks are disrupting the small business financial services space.

“Digital challengers are increasingly shaking up the SME banking and lending market, offering a lifeline to entrepreneurs where traditional players can’t, or won’t,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working with Paul and the team as we focus on building an even more compelling range of products and services for U.K. SMEs.”

The new hire comes as Cashplus continues its pursuit of a U.K. banking license, which it has already applied for and hopes to receive authorization in the first quarter of next year. If the company is cleared to operate as a bank, Cashplus said it will have access to more than $370 million in capital to finance its small business loans.

Late last year, Cashplus announced a new application programming interface (API) allowing small and medium-sized businesses to initiate mass payments to their supplier base at the same time, part of its broader API roadmap, it said at the time. In May the company revealed it had applied for a portion of the $1 billion in Royal Bank of Scotland funds available to U.K. challengers to spur competition in the small business banking market, and also revealed plans to launch a business credit rating service for startups.