Bitso —the leading financial services company powered by crypto in Latin America with 7 million users and 1,500 institutional clients— announced today the appointment of Robert Dennis Harrop as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a British specialist who has worked at Bitso for over two years.

With an MSc in Software Engineering from the prestigious University of Oxford and over two decades of experience in the areas of data engineering, IT development, tech, and finance, Rob Harrop has contributed to the growth of Bitso and other companies of which he was a co-founder such as Cake Solutions (which is currently part of Disney Streaming), SpringSource, Bamboo Loans.

"I’m incredibly proud to lead the outstanding Bitso technology team and continue developing a world-class organization with our clients' needs, security, business strategy, and innovation at the core of everything we do. I am happy to take on this new challenge, which implies continuing to build the infrastructure behind the crypto products that enable financial inclusion and freedom in Latin America,” Harrop said.

Before joining Bitso, Harrop was CEO of Skipjaq Inc., focused on machine learning, which Skyscanner later acquired and where he led the Platform, Developer Enablement, and Data Engineering teams.

At Bitso, he held the positions of Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technologist before being assigned CTO, which has allowed him to learn about the technological challenges of the company, contributing with his knowledge and experience to the growth that Bitso has experienced during the last two years.

Rob is also the author of the book Pro Spring, which became a best-seller on the Spring Framework, an open-source framework that allows the development of applications and investment control based on open source, as well as other notable open-source-related projects such as Eclipse Virgo and availability for RabbitMQ.

Rob replaces Ben Peters, co-founder of the company, who was appointed Chief Research and Innovation Officer. 

Since 2014, Bitso has revolutionized finance in Latin America by becoming the first crypto unicorn in the region to offer border-less, accessible, secure, and easy-to-use financial products powered by crypto; Bitso sees technological development and innovation as fundamental components to achieve its mission of making crypto useful.