Mark Ruddock is appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the Group, Chairman of the management board of 4finance Group S.A. and Chairman of the board of 4finance Holding S.A. as of 1 July 2017. George Georgakopoulos is leaving the Group to pursue other interests and steps down from those roles as of 30 June 2017.
Mark has been a member of the Group’s supervisory board since February 2017. He has over 20 years of leadership experience spanning multi-country online financial services, mission critical enterprise software and consumer-focused mobile applications, and has a proven track record of building fast paced, innovative and scalable businesses.
Lado Gurgenidze and David Geovanis join the Supervisory Board from July. Lado is a career banker and was the Executive Chairman and CEO of Bank of Georgia in addition to senior roles at Putnam Lovell and ABN AMRO. He has extensive experience in the retail banking, regulatory and governmental arenas. David has over 30 years of international investment experience and was a partner at Soros Private Equity Partners. They both have extensive public company board experience.
Nick Jordan, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, commented:
“On behalf of the board I would like to thank George for all his contributions in leading 4finance over the past year. We wish him all the best in his future endeavours.
“We are delighted that Mark has agreed to take on the role. His deep industry experience and track record as an innovator will serve us well as 4finance continues to expand and diversify its business. We also welcome Lado Gurgenidze and David Geovanis to the supervisory board. They bring a wealth of experience in banking, consumer finance, investment and regulatory affairs to the board to guide our strategic and capital markets development.”
Mark Ruddock, CEO of 4finance, added:
“I look forward to working with the team as we accelerate our efforts to build a sustainable, responsible high performance business that puts customers at the heart of what we do. 4finance is uniquely positioned to deliver an exciting mobile-first offering that leverages deep technology and data science to provide compelling financial products and services to those underserved by traditional financial institutions.”
Mark Ruddock biography
2016 – 2017
CEO of Finstar Labs, which aims to identify, invest in and help create the cutting edge
user experiences, enabling technologies, and data science that will lay the foundation for the next
generation of alternative financial services.
2011 – 2016
Managing Director, International at Wonga, overseeing their consumer lending
operations for Spain, Poland, South Africa and Canada, their investment in the Scandinavian
company Folkefinans, and their e-commerce business, BillPay, in Germany.
2010 – 2011
Interim CEO of StatusNet, an open source Social Software platform that is now
powering GNU Social. The company was named one of the 10 Canadian Cloud companies to
watch in May 2011 by IDC.
2007 – 2010
CEO of the fast-growing mobile software company, Viigo, which was acquired in 2010
by Research in Motion. Viigo became one of the most popular Blackberry apps and won numerous
awards. The company was backed by Ventures West & RBC Venture Partners.
2006 – 2007
Entrepreneur in Residence, Ventures West, which was Canada’s leading Venture
Capital firm with over $700MM in committed capital.
1992 – 2006
Founder and CEO of INEA, a software company focused on the Financial Services
Industry. INEA became a strategic partner to many of the world’s leading financial institutions and
was deployed in over 44 countries. It was backed by RBC Venture partners, Ventures West, APAX
Partners and Edgestone Capital and was acquired in 2006.
