Dive Brief:

• Global remittance payment group Zepz has snapped up PayPal veteran Robert Mitchell to serve as its CFO as it looks to foster further growth, the London, U.K.-based entity announced in a Tuesday press release.
• Zepz, the parent company of remittance service WorldRemit, reached profitability during the first half of this year and is aiming to continue growth, according to the release. It also operates another global remittance brand, Sendwave, which it acquired in February 2021.
• The company, which will detail its H1 2022 financials in an upcoming performance release, reported a 67% bump in group revenue year-over-year for 2021. The group reported $399 million in full-year revenue compared to $238 million in 2020, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

The company will be focusing on setting “a number of strategic priorities in place” for the remainder of the year, Mitchell said in an interview, noting that while the company had gone through “some type of slowdown in terms of restructuring,” it is well positioned for future growth.

“We have all the resources we need from a headcount standpoint — the market is very strong, we have a strong brand position,” he said. “So it's really how do we organize ourselves with tactical initiatives to expand in our current market and also adjacent markets as well.”

Zepz just reached profitability in H1 and is continuing to scale, Mitchell said. For the next year, “as CFO I've been brought in to really take the finance function to the next level — what you would find in a public fintech company,” he said. “More automation, more analytics-driven decision making, pivoting finance towards more of a strategic partner than maybe what it has been before.”

Mitchell is the latest in a line of executive hires for the company, which began as remittance payments service WorldRemit in 2010. The company’s new financial leader is coming into its C-suite less than a month behind its newly-minted CEO Mark Lenhard — a former Bill.com executive — who took on the position effective Sept. 1, according to a company release. 

Lenhard and Mitchell have previously worked together with the group’s new CEO also a PayPal alum. Lenhard served as head of global strategy for the firm between 2010 and 2014, per his LinkedIn.

“Mark and I are being brought in almost as a pair, if you will, and I think it's been working out really well,” Mitchell said.

Lenhard took over from former CEO Breon Corcoran, who announced his intention to depart in June after detailing plans in February to cut approximately 5% of WorldRemit’s workforce, according to a July 21 report by Bloomberg.

Zepz’s CFO seat, meanwhile, has faced a revolving door over the past few years  — previous WorldRemit Group CFO Andras Mecser departed in April 2021 after serving in the position for two years, according to his LinkedIn. Financial executive Michael Ball then moved into the company’s top financial seat and departed in March 2022, according to his LinkedIn. He is now serving as CFO for technology platform Jumo.

The company’s C-suite troubles come after the firm suffered a delay in preparations for a potential initial public offering (IPO) after struggling to conduct checks on customer accounts in a timely fashion, a July 13 Bloomberg report found. The company — which was originally seeking a valuation as high as $6 billion for its IPO — noted that the allegations of its accounting issues were “speculative and factually incorrect,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

An experienced payments executive, Mitchell is faced with bolstering growth at the expanding company following its faltered IPO plans. The company is not contemplating an IPO at the current time, he said.

“I think Mark and I have been brought up with a specific mandate to build and grow a great business with what’s been assembled and really realize the value,” he said.

Mitchell held various roles for payments processing firm PayPal over his 11-year tenure with the company, serving as CFO for its peer-to-peer payments service Venmo for a year from September 2020 until December 2021.

Mitchell was tapped to lead monetization efforts for the service during his time at the app’s financial helm and helped the peer-to-peer tool expand to support cryptocurrencies and other commerce services, according to his LinkedIn.  

Like Zepz, Mitchell’s former company PayPal is also struggling with C-suite challenges after reporting lukewarm results for its past quarter amid rotating financial leadership. One-month CFO Blake Jorgensen recently departed for medical leave, leaving PayPal SVP of Capital Markets Gabrielle Rabinovitch serving her second term as interim.  

Before making the move to Zepz, Mitchell previously served as CFO and a member of the board of directors for one-click online checkout company Fast, a technology startup backed by payments behemoth Stripe.

The online checkout firm ceased its operations on April 15 due to a lack of financial resources, according to an internal email from then-CEO Domm Holland to employees obtained by Business Insider in an April 5 report.

Holland said in the email that the “the current environment has been extremely challenging for high-growth tech companies, including Fast.” He also noted that many of the company’s engineers would have the opportunity to join buy now-pay later firm Affirm per an agreement between the two entities.