Executive Team
Graham Byrne
Chief Executive Officer
Graham has over 20 years of experience across financial services and non-bank lending dealing directly with Irish SMEs. In 2005, Graham started Bibby Financial Services Ireland (BFS). In that period up to 2013, BFS Ireland provided over 200m in funding, serviced over 500 customers, and was responsible for maintaining and creating over 5,000 jobs. BFS Ireland was award-winning in the industry and won the business of the year 2012 and 2013. Graham then took up the Chief Commercial Officer role for the European region tasked with restructuring 14 operating companies to increase customer service delivery and increase the availability of credit to EU SME’s. Graham successfully started new businesses in Czech, Slovakia, and the Netherlands. The business grew to reach 2,500 clients providing over 900m of funding to clients. Graham is also chairman of the Small firms association (SFA) and is on the board of IBEC.
Brendan Phelan
Chief Financial Officer
Brendan is a vastly experienced chartered accountant and has enjoyed a successful career as a finance leader, predominantly in the ICT and Financial Services sectors, spanning both large global banking institutions and entrepreneurial non-bank lending start-ups. In recent times he has specialized in, raising funds, scaling businesses, and seeking exits, but with over 30 years of background in corporate governance, treasury, and regulation space, he will also add considerably to Flender's operational expertise. Previous employers include BetDaq, Aercap, Accelerated Payments, Lombard, and Barclays.
Mark Hughes
Head of Credit & Risk
Mark brings over 30 years of experience to the position where he has worked across all areas of operations, risk, credit, compliance, relationship management, recoveries, and audit. Furthermore, Mark brings extensive knowledge in the areas of Asset Based Lending, financing receivables, inventory, property, plant, machinery, and cash flow loans. Previous employers include Bibby Financial Services, Lloyds Commercial Finance, ABN AMRO Commercial Finance, and GMAC Commercial Credit
Colin Canny
Head of Originations
Colin has over 10 years of experience across the banking and financial services industry with a specific focus on business development, B2B sales, and strategic account management. Previous employers include the Bluestone Group and AIB where he served alongside the senior management team in various roles including sales, product design, business development, and credit analysis. In his role with Flender, Colin is responsible for direct management of the entire Flender Originations team and Flenders intermediary network of over 300 brokers across Ireland.
Oleksii Danylevskyi
Head of Information Technology
Oleksii is an expert in all aspects of system design, development and implementation. He is an experienced software engineer using Ruby and PHP for 8 years. His main interests lie in Cloud Computing and Microservices. Oleksii has a MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev.
Flender Team
Almina Kapetanovic
Credit Analyst
With more than nine years of experience within the SME/Corporate and Retail Banking sector, Almina brings expertise in credit analysis with particular focus on SMEs spread over a wide variety of business sectors. Almina holds a Masters in Financial Management and she is fully QFA qualified. She is also ACCA part-qualified and is working on completing this professional qualification.
Cassie Long
Partner Originations Executive
Cassie joined the Flender team in June 2019. She has two years experience in the Finance sector, working for a finance broker in the North West of Ireland. She completed her Honours degree in Business specialising in Finance in 2017 with the Institute of Technology Sligo and is APA qualified with the Institute of Banking. Her role in Flender will be is assisting Flender partnerships with accountants, financial brokers and SME advisers with all day to day operations.
Paul Kinane
Originations Team Leader
Paul joined Flender as a business development manager in November 2018 bringing over 12 years of business development & account management experience. Pauls past experience comes from the financial services sector wherein he worked with AIB Merchant Services generating new business and building relationship for both SME & Corporate clients. Within his role, Paul’s focus is to build long term relationships with his clients to help them achieve their necessary business growth.
Ursula Cotter
Customer Service Executive
Ursula is a fully qualified QFA and has over 12 years’ experience in the financial services sector. Ursula has worked with both Bank of Ireland and New Ireland Assurance where she developed a broad and valuable skillset through contact with a wide range of customers and products. Ursula’s focus is to provide exemplar service and support to Flender’s clients and partners. Ursula joined Flender in February 2020.
MingHsuan Huang
User Experience Developer
MingHsuan has 5 years visual design experience in the IT industry and specialises in web design, visual communication and multimedia design. He is a pure UX enthusiast and holds an MA in Interaction Design from National College of Art and Design.
Nitanshu Rehani
Software Engineer
Nitanshu is a proactive full stack ruby on rails software engineer with over two and half years of experience in the IT industry. In addition, he is a highly driven individual with masters in Information System With Computing from Dublin Business School.
Jin Lim
Full Stack Developer
Jin is a full-stack Web Application Developer and Software Developer. He has a BSc. in Information Technology from the College of Computing Technology in Dublin, and has 2 years’ experience as a Java software engineer with a focus on Android development. Jin has a keen interest in Ruby on Rails and a passion for writing clean and efficient code. He is driven, self-motivated and constantly experimenting with new technologies and techniques. He is passionate about Web Development and strives to better himself as a developer. Jin joined the Flender team in February 2020.
Board of Directors
David Mc Namara
Chairman
Serving on Flender’s Risk Oversight and Audit committee, David has worked in high yield credit, and intensive and structured debt capital markets, in major international banks including Chase Manhattan and JPMorgan in London.
Gerry Jennings
Director
Gerry is a very experienced financier, property and business investor. His background is in banking where he spent more than 25 years working at senior level in business, corporate and property finance. Following his banking career he joined Jaguar capital as a director overseeing an International property portfolio and executing transactions in excess of €2.Billion.
