Earthport Chief Financial Officer to leave

Earthport, a cross-border payments company, has announced that Zafar Karim, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and an executive director, is stepping down from the board on October 31st.

Having helped turn the company around since his arrival in 2009, Karim is apparently keen to get back to his investing and restructuring activities.

He will continue to assist the company during a transitional period to the end of the year while a new CFO is found. Chris Cowland, Chief Operating Officer will join the board as executive director effective immediately.

The company appears to be making progress and despite still being loss making, with little indication of when it will break-even, has an impressive list of institutional shareholders, including: Henderson Global Investors (14%), Schroder (12.61%) and Blackrock (6.91%).

Peter McNally, analyst at house broker Charles Stanley comments: "The management has done exceptionally well signing up some large corporate customers such as Yandex.Money, Western Union, IBM GERS, Fiserv, among others. It now appears that customers are ramping usage of Earthport's service. We look forward to hearing more detail at the results which are due to be released in late November."

CM