Amfin welcomes new COO

The new COO has worked in a range of finance businesses, most notably as COO of BOQ Finance between 2016-2018 and as general manager for Alleasing (2007-2011).

He has experience in asset and equipment finance, strategic planning, business development, M&A and business transformation. 

For the past three years, Mr Vujnovich has been helping deliver transformation initiatives to a range of companies, including TL Commercial and import business UNTIL Pty Ltd.

Mr Vujnovich, who started his new position on 1 March, will oversee the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of a business as it ramps up to diversify into other areas.

Speaking of the appointment, Amfin CEO George Dib told The Adviser: “As Amfin continues to diversify its offering and venture further into technology investment, it was always part of our strategy to hire a chief operating officer. 

“Marc brings the kind of experience that will help Amfin not only solidify its position in the market, but build a best in class offering to our partners and clients. Marc’s experience in asset finance, banking and technology will help us deliver a customer experience like no other,” he said.

Mr Dib added: “Marc understands the ambitions of the business, and as a team, we will build on what’s already been a successful journey.”

Mr Vujnovich said it was “a very exciting time to join Amfin” and looked forward to helping realise the group’s future vision.

He told The Adviser: “If you look at how it’s grown in the last few years, it’s actually quite astounding; it’s been a very successful business. In the last six months, it’s gone into, what I call, hyper growth.

“When George and I met, he talked about the business and passionately so, and we had a real alignment in our values. I think those values are really, really clear; it’s about providing the best possible customer service that you can, and being able to do better, and doing that honestly and effectively. 

“So, I felt immediately from the outset that George and I actually had very shared values on where the business needed to go.”

As well as hiring Mr Vujnovich, Amfin has also made several internal changes to staff.

Business analyst Chris Rhee has been made head of data, strategy and transformation; Richard Helal has been appointed as head of sales, and Christopher Bonnici has moved up from team leader of Amfin to director of Amfin Commercial – as the company expands out its service offering to other areas of commercial finance.

Mr Dib outlined: “Our short-term goals are to deliver an outstanding service. So, the first thing that we need to do is to ensure that we are still delivering a service better than others, and we’re continuously enhancing what we do. 

“Our next strategy is to diversify to other products. So, if you knew Amfin from the start, we were  predominately just cars. We’ve morphed now into anything essentially with a serial number. But the next part is to really develop a commercial offering. That means that we are doing more, bigger-ticket transactions, such as commercial property transactions, and even unsecured business lending. And it’s all come off the back of what our referral base wants. Everything that we’ve done to date has done on the back of that.”

The CEO continued: “So I guess that the short and the medium-term goals are to shore up what we do, get really good at it, diversify our offerings so that when a broker or referrer comes to us, they don’t have any real reason to leave... That’s a really important thing.”

Mr Vujnovich agreed, stating: “I see this as a starting point for Amfin, and it has some really exciting opportunities lined up. 

“While the short and medium term is really about stabilizing the business so that we can support that growth without any degradation to our services, the long-term plan is to provide a much wider suite of products, where we really become more of a trusted adviser to SMEs. They can come to us, the brokers can feel comfortable that they’re referring their business to us, and we’re representing our partners as best we can,” he said.

[Related: Amfin welcomes new head of sales and BDM]