Caroline Murphree Managing Director - Savings, Investing and Retirement, Moneybox

Company

Moneybox are a consumer wealth app, on a mission to help everyone save and invest for their future. On the basis of the fact that none of us are taught how to save and invest at school, the investment industry is built to serve a wealthy minority, and banks are only interested in selling products and not actually helping customers achieve outcomes.

Moneybox position themselves to assist customers through their financial life, and by targeting the Mass Market, Moneybox are growing at over 120% YoY, and offer customers a range of tools and rewards through their mobile app, with products including Savings, Investments, Retirement and Mortgage Advice. They have recently announced their Series D from Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, taking total funding to $120m.

Search Background

At the time of kick off, having raised their Series C and grown their team rapidly to more than 200 people, Moneybox were looking to build out their leadership team to support the Founders Ben Stanway and Charlie Mortimer. They had also expanded their product suite to include four key “missions”: Savings, Investing, Mortgages and Retirement, and so wanted to bring on a Managing Director to own the core Saving and Investment missions, as well as the nascent Retirement mission, driving the commercial metrics across the overall proposition and service, owning the P&L for those three missions.

Requirements

The search focused on General Managers/Managing Directors who could lead a cross-functional matrixed team, but with ultimate responsibility for the customer experience, commercial performance and proposition for two of the original products, as well as one much more nascent one. It was a very commercially focused role as ultimately this person needed to take ownership for commercializing the user experience, and ensuring that all new features and product development had a sound commercial case behind them, with previous experience owning a P&L. The search covered markets beyond Financial Services, which included consumer focused D2C services businesses, with a preference for people from regulated businesses.

Result

We ended up placing Caroline Murphree into the role. At the time she was the Europe CEO for Wealthsimple, a US Headquartered online investment manager. She was responsible for growing Wealthsimple in Europe from a team of 10 to a team of 25, growing assets under management 10x to c.£270m and with around 16,000 customers. This led to their acquisition by Moneyfarm. She joined Wealthsimple from McKinsey, where she had spent 5 years in a range of roles, ultimately as Chief of Staff.