Katrin
Herrling

Founder
& CEO

Katrin has been managing her family’s dairy farm for more than 15 years. She has helped to grow the farm and transform the operations. The business is much more than a source of income. It is a huge part of her family life.

Katrin has always worked with her bank to finance the farm and ensure smooth cash flow, but ran into difficulties in 2010 when her bank manager doubled her cost of credit overnight.

The frustration of running from one bank to another to secure offers inspired Funding Xchange. Katrin is passionate about making it easy, quick and transparent for businesses to find finance.

It probably helped that Katrin had a parallel career advising large banks and financial firms and understood that they often were not the right answer for a small business that needed funding. So, Funding Xchange sets out to get business owners in the position where they can easily compare terms available from many providers, increasing the chances that one of the offers is going to be right for the business.

Ultimately, Katrin wants Funding Xchange to give you control over finding finance that’s right for you and your plans for your business. Quickly and easily. So that you can continue to build your business and life.

Katrin would love to hear from you. Please let her know if we have helped you find funding or have feedback to help us build an even better service.

Paul
Henry

Chief Operating
Officer

A growing number of decades driving at successful outcomes for businesses using data and analytics and still a few hairs left on my head.

After moving from completing a Chemistry degree, to teaching PE in a school for a couple of years, the next chapter in my career started in a small boutique consultancy, The pH Group, focussed on helping banks, utilities, insurance companies and other small business service providers identify those businesses with the most appetite for their products and services. This role developed a thirst for data, and using analysis of this data to drive actionable insight.

When the business was acquired by Experian in 2007, new dimensions of credit assessment information and enabling small businesses to contribute their own data to help them find the outcomes they are looking for, created a 360 degree view of a business.

This was a natural pathway to Funding Xchange where helping small businesses find the money they require, has data, analysis and balancing the needs of the SME and lenders at its heart.

As COO I’m involved in most things, having only a thin layer of expertise in most areas, I’m extremely fortunate to be surrounded by genuine experts in their field that make this business tick.

Outside of work, my family, wife, two teenage sons and an energetic dog battle for my time with the urge to go for a run and a garden that never looks as tidy as I would like it to.
Rugby is a true passion having played a little, coached a lot and watched far too much, I still turn out for the odd game of touch rugby on a Wednesday night.

Sarah
Hollyhead

Chief Financial
Officer

Sarah does the sums at FXE! A qualified accountant with a background in consultancy and private equity, Sarah is also heavily involved in our commercial strategy supporting our vision of building long term sustainable and ethical value for our business. Having spent nearly a decade advising clients on transactions at KPMG, Sarah brings a wealth of financial experience across a broad range of industries.

Having become a new mum in September 2019, Sarah combines her role at FXE with raising Max and when she does get a rare moment to herself (!) loves to get an adrenaline fix downhill mountain biking.

Ben
Sher

Chief Commercial Officer

Ben is a financial technology leader with 20 years experience in the sector across Capital Markets, Commodities and SME Finance. Prior to joining FXE, Ben held various commercial leadership roles at SunGard and FIS for 10 years before delivering the growth of Cloud Lending Solutions in the SME Lending arena. He is passionate about the creation of value that drives access to capital for SMEs and has regularly spoken in industry forums about the need for broader digital advancement across our ecosystem.

Ben is responsible for the go to market, commercial and growth strategy of FXE with a particular focus on the scaling of our technology business.

On a personal front Ben is keen in keeping fit, growing vegetables in his garden and spending time with his two young daughters.

Ben
Alexander

Chief Technology Officer

After completing a degree in Maths and Physics, Ben started his career with a boutique fund management company as an investment analyst and helping out with AML/KYC. In 2009 Ben joined Experian, met Paul, and started managing the analytics and marketing databases, becoming Head of Data Engineering in 2015. Ben brings over a decade’s experience in managing and using data on businesses, especially for analytics, AML/KYC and credit risk. At Experian he also put in place the framework for the use of open data, becoming one of the larger users in the country.

Ben’s passions include seeing and helping other people enjoy their jobs and succeed at them, working out how to improve our interactions with technology to get things done better and wrangling with how data is stored and used.

Outside of work, Ben doesn’t play enough board games, and loves walking along hills.

Phil
Cook

Director of Propositions & Delivery

Phil is a Commercial & Marketing leader with sweet spot in product & proposition development, strategy & execution. A track record of delivering step change in performance for household brands & digital start-ups. With a reputation for defining, building & delivering innovative, customer-centric solutions that drive commercial outcomes, built upon over 20 years experience within Financial Services and Telecoms. Phil joined Funding Xchange to support and drive end to end Client Delivery.

Outside of work, a lot of time goes into family, particularly his two young boys and what’s left goes into his passions of tennis, surfing and badly playing the guitar.

Jen
McDonald

Head of Marketplace Operations

As Head of Marketplace Operations, Jen’s job is to make sure that our customers receive the best possible support and to look after the team that are making this happen. She’s always looking for new ways to get better outcomes for our customers.
Before joining Funding Xchange, Jen worked for Asto, a digital lender. She designed the customer onboarding process and set up the brand new operations team.

A keen cook, Jen loves having a team to feed her baking to. When she’s not cooking or eating, Jen prefers to spend her free time outside – hiking, sailing or skiing.

Nick
Steventon-Pell

Finance
Director

Nick, along with the rest of the finance team, makes sure the numbers add up and people get paid. He is a chartered accountant and a financial services specialist. Having previously worked in restructuring for 8 years, he has joined Funding Xchange to support a rapidly growing business transforming SME lending.

When he’s not sat in front of spreadsheets, Nick is a keen climber, having done a variety of routes across UK, Europe and South America, and a runner, still searching for the illusive sub 3 hour marathon time.

Andy
Ballard

QA
Manager

As the QA Manager within our Tech team, Andy is responsible for planning and implementing the necessary test processes and approaches to ensure the successful delivery of platform features and software quality across our entire tech estate. He has worked for multiple companies in QA roles, from established tech companies to start-ups across various sectors, including edtech and fintech.

When he’s not hacking around golf courses, Andy spends his free-time enjoying countryside walks with his wife and beloved rescue dog, Robyn.

Gianni
Di Raimondo

Head of
Product

Product leader with 10 years of experience in digital strategy, product development and management consulting – specialised in fintech, insurtech and financial services.

Strong advocate of data and outcome-driven product management – at Funding Xchange Gianni focuses on building products and services that solve real customer needs, create strategic value and generate measurable commercial benefits.

Over the years, Gianni has successfully led an increasing number of cross-functional teams to devise, deliver and optimise 10+ innovative products and platforms in the UK and other countries – using Lean, Agile and SAFe methodologies to ensure continuous discovery and incremental delivery.

To date, Gianni’s biggest career achievement is being part of the core team that in 15 months envisioned, created and launched ‘TYL’ – an award-winning UK challenger Bank for SMEs that enabled the Royal Bank of Scotland to re-enter the merchant acquiring industry in 2019.

Once a hardcore online gamer, Gianni still loves spending his time playing videogames or trading Stocks, Forex and Cryptocurrencies. Although Italian, Gianni disappointedly doesn’t know how to cook.

David
Morris

Head of Software Engineering

As Head of Software Engineering, David works closely with our CTO, Product Owners and Engineers to achieve immediate and long-term business goals. He helps facilitate the translation of business requirements, and makes sure the engineering department delivers within expected timelines. He has over 15 years’ experience in Software Engineering, archicture and design, working full-stack for the majority of this time and with Java, Javascript frameworks and Microsoft based development languages. His previous role was Director of Software Engineeering for a large US based Wholesale and Retail Domain and E-commerce business. He’s also a certified Agile Practitoner/Scrum Master.

Being Welsh, he is passionate about rugby and the Welsh national team, as well as the Scarlets.

Neal
Dutta

Head of Business Analytics

As Head of Business Analytics, Neal and his team drive commercial insights from Marketplace data – continually searching for opportunities to seize, issues to address and facilitating data driven decision making throughout the business. Prior to joining FXE, Neal worked in consumer credit risk analytics for a wide variety of financial services organisations – from the major high street banks to smaller challengers and fintechs. He’s previously held senior managerial roles, but was most recently an independent analytics consultant.

Originally from Canada, Neal still has his accent (doesn’t say “eh” as much as he used to though!), enjoys spending time with his wife and children (son aged 7, daughter aged 16).

Erikas
Kamaitis

Lead Data
Scientist

If data is a fruit, Erik is the person helping you squeeze a glass full of insight juice. He achieves this by leading a team of data scientists, creating funky visualisations, writing ravioli code and hunting for bugs in 3rd party APIs. Coming from a Mechanical Engineering background, he previously worked in the Energy sector and harnessed his analytical skills to help wind farms strive in the harsh environments they operate in.

Erik dabbles in game development… though like most hobbyist developers never really finishes a project. DO NOT bring that up in front of him – he’s trained in Jeet Kune Do (might hurt himself)!

Liam Mayoux-Andrews

Senior Solutions Consultant

As Senior Solutions Consultant Liam’s job is to work alongside the FXE Technologies sales and commercial teams to translate the problems our customers face into actionable solutions – working at the intersection between sales, product and delivery.

Prior to joining FXE Liam worked at fintech startup Divido, where as one of the earliest employees he was key in helping them to launch their white labelled POS finance platform, leading their solutions function to then deliver the platform to some of the worlds largest banks and retailers.

In his spare time Liam is a keen 5-aside football player, where on the west London circuit he has the nickname ‘the cat’ – which he likes to think is down to his fast reflexes but is more likely due to his love of snacks and refusal to do any running out field.

Sati
Dhanjal

Head of
Marketing

Sati is a digital marketing specialist who has over 10 years experience in acquisition and optimisation within the financial services arena. He has previously held a number of senior marketing positions for UK and US based organisations, in the fintech and lending sector. He started his career at Experian and prior to joining us he led a Tier 2 mortgage lender launch a new line of business within the digital arena.

In his spare time his twins keep him very busy and enjoys a number of gym classes. He recently entered his first half marathon only to receive an email 24 hours later confirming the date was pushed back 7 months due to COVID (he still plans on running it!)

Will
Hurst

Sales
Director