Receivables Finance Connect appoints Rob Harris to lead new Technology & Innovation Council

Receivables Finance Connect has appointed Rob Harris, Head of Operations & Technology at Investec Capital Solutions, to lead its new Technology & Innovation Council. The appointment marks a significant step in the community’s ambition to reshape how the receivables finance sector approaches innovation, product design, and the role of technology in driving future growth. The Council’s north star is “To inspire a receivables product culture that challenges convention, rewards creativity and seeks to grow the market through the power of bright ideas.”

He read Modern History, Politics & Economics at the University of Southampton before beginning his career at RBS Invoice Finance in 1994. He went on to work in GE Capital’s Global Consumer Finance business.

Rob later spent over 15 years at Close Brothers, initially as IT & Development Director and then subsequently as Chief Operating Officer and as Managing Director of Close Brothers Invoice Finance. During his time there, he led the team that built Ideal, one of the first invoice discounting products to connect directly with clients’ accounting applications. He went on to become Chief Operating Officer of Close Brothers Retail Finance before joining Loxbear Advisory and, in 2023, Investec Capital Solutions.

Reflecting on his route into the industry, Rob said: “The receivables world has a tendency to get under your skin. You recognise that at a fundamental level, financing growing small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) through their stream of invoices is a good idea. The challenge for all of us is to imagine and build funding products that mirror that simplicity.”

A mandate to change the mindset

Asked what he wants the Council to have achieved in five years’ time, Rob is unequivocal: “I want to be able to say that we changed the mindset, and we persuaded the sector to look out and forward rather than in and back.”

He draws a clear distinction between technology and innovation: “Technology is a critical enabling thread in how the sector innovates, but it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It’s our collective innovation and invention that identifies the products that will help grow our sector.”

Innovation at the core

Rob’s thinking directly shapes who he wants around the Council table, and the group he is building looks well beyond the software desk: “We need creativity in all its forms – I’m keen that we find the forward-looking lawyers and underwriters just as much as the creative technologists.”

He also wants to see a broader mix of ages and backgrounds than the industry has traditionally drawn on: “This Council will certainly benefit from broader age representation, encouraging the challenge of established conventions that more naturally comes from those more recently entering the sector.”

Looking beyond the sector

Rob also wants the Council to include people who have innovated in other industries: “It would be exciting to include people who have run completely different businesses but have innovated within those. I don’t want to anchor it too much in a non-receivables world, but it does need some balance. Otherwise, you’re just going to miss out on bright and relevant ideas.”

Dissolving expertise into systems

Rob points to what he calls “dissolving expertise”: “As a sector we have a huge accrued stock of receivables funding expertise. One of the challenges in developing the next generation of products is how we capture and deploy that insight and know-how into software models. How do we take that individual human capability and dissolve it into our systems?”

The emergence of AI-driven risk agents

Rob points to the emergence of AI-driven risk agents as a sign of the future: “It feels inevitable to me that a greater share of risk analysis and decisions will be made or at least heavily directed by AI data bots over the next few years.”

He doesn’t think it is far off: “It would be a brave shareholder who commissioned a bot to run a portfolio today. But it won’t be long. I would be amazed if there aren’t players in our market within a couple of years who have AI agents running material risk and portfolio decisions.”

Looking beyond faster horses

Rob wonders if the sector has spent too long improving the speed of familiar processes rather than reconsidering the underlying design, the old problem of asking for a faster horse instead of re-imagining the car. He explains: “The vast majority of our technology investment over the last 30 years has been aimed at just faster versions of the components we’ve had historically. The invoice discounting car for 2026 looks recognisable next to the invoice discounting car of 1996. You flip the bonnet up and the components might look slightly different, but they’re broadly still solving the same process challenges. There’s something in reimagining rather than rebuilding.”

Rob accepts reaching that goal means living with setbacks on the way there: “The vast majority of ideas will fail and end up on the cutting room floor. It’s about enabling the future.”

That future, he believes, requires a more contemporary way of delivering a fundamentally straightforward product. Funding SMEs through their stream of invoices is, in his view, a simple and compelling idea that the industry has made unnecessarily complex through layers of legacy design.

Rob concluded: “If I can do one thing, it’s getting the sector to live the simplicity of funding SMEs against the stream of receivables.”

Commenting on Rob’s appointment, Mike Symes, Community Leader of Receivables Finance Connect, said: “Rob’s appointment signals the ambition this sector needs. His insistence on invention over incrementalism and his ability to bring people together across disciplines make him exactly the right person to lead this Council. Looking backwards is no longer an option, and that refusal to settle for small, safe steps is what the industry needs. We’re delighted he is leading this work. His appointment puts innovation where it belongs, at the heart of the Council, and it’s how we take the industry and its technologies forward.”

Save the date

Receivables Finance Connect will convene at the Finance Connect Conference on Tuesday 24 November 2026 at Kings Place Events, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG, bringing together more than 850 senior leaders from across specialist finance. The event will include dedicated content, networking and working sessions for lenders, intermediaries and specialists across asset and receivables finance.

Get involved

To find out more about the Technology & Innovation Council or express an interest in joining, contact Mike Symes at mikesymes@finance-connect.com or Edward Peck at edwardpeck@finance-connect.com.

About Receivables Finance Connect

Receivables Finance Connect is a professional community for the receivables finance and asset-based lending sector. Its mission is to connect senior practitioners and enable meaningful engagement, providing a marketplace of ideas that encourages innovation, supports sustainable growth and helps the sector better serve its customers.