We heard New York-based venture-backed fintech company Moven laid off at least a dozen staffers from its two-year-old Radnor office last week, including CTO Bob Savino, who led the local office.
“Yes, that’s the approximate number,” CEO and cofounder Brett King confirmed in a phone conversation with Technical.ly on Tuesday. “This is a restructure around the enterprise business.”
The move comes one month after recruiter Mark Constan (who was also laid off) said the company was hiring for 20 open positions.
The exec also confirmed the former CTO was among those let go last week. We reached out to Savino to get his take, but he declined to comment. He was the reason the company opened an office in the Philly region.
“Bob did a great job for us.” King said. “He got us to a point where he should be proud of. We just needed to look at some slightly different skills moving forward. A core of his team will stay, so his legacy lives on.”
Savino was replaced by Kumar Ampani, an ex-Chariot Solutions engineer and one of Savino’s early hires at the Radnor office.
Hiring Philly tech companies, take note: Those affected in the layoffs included data analysts, an office manager and at least one UX designer and one recruiter.
Cofounder and president Alex Sion, based in New York, also left the company last month to lead mobile banking at JPMorgan Chase. He did not respond to a request for comment.
On Sion’s move, King said to the American Banker, “[T]he business is fairly mature now. We’ve been going from that early stage to a growth company and it requires some different skills.”
King declined to offer the company’s headcount post-layoffs, hinting at some upcoming offshore hires and deals with financial institutions outside of the U.S over the next three to six months. For the time being, though, the company’s Radnor presence stays put.
“There are no plans to close the Philly office, we continue to be very bullish on Radnor,” King said.
The business-to-consumer platform, which lets users manage their money in a mobile-first environment, will remain active. The company just wont be growing it as aggressively.
Last we checked, the company was 60-strong and on a push to hire another 20, as per recruiter Constan, who left eMoney Advisor for Moven in September. Forty of those staffers were Radnor-based, according to Savino at the time he penned that guest post for us. We put Moven on our October list of 12 fintech companies worth keeping an eye on. We didn’t think a round of layoffs would be our next update.
“We’re just making a lot more profit out of the enterprise business,” King explained. “The revenue is stronger. And we have an obligation to our shareholders.”
Per King’s own words, the upcoming deals stand a chance to carry the company through the B2B transition. He did, however, point out the new model requires Moven to have a different team structure, with more staffers working remotely or out of client sites. So it remains to be seen if the company will ever regain the same Philly footprint.
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