South African-born and Silicon Valley-based global customer engagement company, Clickatell, has made three new appointments to its board as it enters its next phase of growth and global expansion.
Michael Jordaan, respected financial services expert, venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, joins Clickatell as the Chairman of the board. Mr Jordaan was previously the CEO at FNB, one of South Africa’s leading banks. Under his leadership, FNB was named the “World’s Most Innovative Bank” at the 2012 Global Banking Innovation Awards for its pioneering move away from traditional banking. Mr Jordaan now heads up Montegray Capital, a private investment company and lends a strategic hand to various businesses, including as Chairman of credit bureau CompuScan, Director and shareholder of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Chairman of Wines of South Africa and as director and shareholder of the listed data network RAIN.
Mr Jordaan is joined by non-executive directors, Willem van Biljon and Ryno Blignaut.
Entrepreneur and technologist, Willem van Biljon, co-founded Mosaic Software that developed the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems. He later joined Amazon where he led the team that developed Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), now Amazon Cloud. Mr van Biljon has worked extensively with online retailer Takealot.com where he served as CTO and currently as advisor.
Ryno Blignaut has 23 years of financial experience. He currently serves as President, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer at Restoration Hardware (RH). He also served as the Chief Business Officer of Wheels Up, a private aviation company. Mr Blignaut was the CFO and Chief Risk Officer at Xoom Corporation, an online and mobile money transfer company. He was instrumental in Xoom’s 2013 public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange and its subsequent $890 million acquisition by Paypal in 2015.
“Our new appointments are a mix of technologists and financial services experts. Michael Jordaan has first-hand knowledge of the needs and challenges of mobile banking through his investment in the app-driven bank, Bank Zero,” commented Clickatell CEO and founder, Pieter de Villiers. “We will benefit from the tremendous insight offered by Willem. His experience scaling up infrastructure and serviceability at global technology companies is vital for us at this stage of our business. Ryno understands the complexities of global regulations across multiple geographies and has experience managing a global business footprint.”
The appointments come at an opportune time as Clickatell plans to build on a 30% year-on-year organic growth across its regions of global operations.
“We see chat banking and chat commerce growing rapidly around the world. Our board’s collective global experience along with our leadership team’s on-the-ground emerging market success gives us an edge enjoyed by very few companies,” de Villiers added.
