MoneyFarm, the digital wealth management company, has appointed David Jeffery as Chief Technology Officer ahead of its UK launch.

Prior to MoneyFarm, David worked at music site, Last.fm, where he spent three years as CTO, developing the company’s use of big data and software innovation that has been behind the business’ rapid growth. Prior to this, David was Chief Software Architect at Betfair for nine years, joining what was still a start-up and helping to build the world’s largest online betting exchange.

David Jeffery will have responsibility for developing MoneyFarm’s ‘mobile first’ approach which will allow investors to manage every aspect of their wealth portfolio from a mobile device, including the development of the app allowing investors to manage their wealth portfolio. MoneyFarm says that up until now UK based financial services firms have only made a small slice of their services available to users on mobile devices as opposed to desktops.

David’s technology team will almost double in size by the end of 2016, with the majority of this growth in technology staff taking place in MoneyFarm’s London office.

David Jeffery, Chief Technology Officer of MoneyFarm, says: “I’m delighted to be joining the MoneyFarm team ahead of its ambitious plans to become a leader in the UK’s fintech space. The brand’s ‘mobile-first’ approach is almost unique in UK financial services and is set to be a major part of revolution in how FS companies deliver their services.”

“MoneyFarm sees technology as a central function of its business and a key differentiator. Unlike competitors, we see in-house development of our own proprietary technology as key to that. It is hard to deliver innovative technology that will deliver the very best in customer service if you are reliant on off-the-shelf technology.”

“It is that commitment to technology and customer service that has already put MoneyFarm into a market leading position in Italy.”

Giovanni Daprà, Co-founder & CEO of MoneyFarm, adds: “We are delighted that David is joining us. He shares the same passion for delivering ever better customer service through user friendly technology as we do. David’s experience helping to lead one of the original fintech giants from early days to international giant is going to be enormously valuable to us.”

David explains that one of the attractions of the role at MoneyFarm is that the company’s focus on ‘functional programming’ and its adoption of the use of Scala, an increasingly popular programming language in financial services, allows for a mathematical approach to programming and therefore results in fewer bugs.

David Jeffery is uniquely placed to lead MoneyFarm’s technology team as he completed a PhD at The University of Melbourne in the field of ‘functional programming’.