Richard Ambrose is chief executive of Wealthify, the digital investment manager owned by Aviva. He took the role in July 2024, succeeding Andy Russell, after running the money transfer company Azimo.
The First Dotcom Boom
He began his career at Oliver Wyman. In the late 1990s he worked for a couple of web start-ups that failed, and watching the bubble burst from inside taught him to be careful with how much a business spends.
eBay and PayPal
"When I arrived at eBay UK in 2003, it had 25 staff. You'd go to parties and still have to explain what it was," he has recalled. He spent six years at eBay in senior product and marketing roles, where work on fraud and trust drew him to PayPal. There he spent another six years, becoming UK marketing director and then chief of staff for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Azimo's Mission
He joined Azimo as chief operating officer in 2017 and became chief executive in July 2019. In the second quarter of that year it turned profitable, with most of its 170 staff in Krakow, Poland. "Some of our customers are migrants who don't see their children from one year to the next," he has said. "We felt there was deep unfairness about the transfer charges they had to bear." Over his time he watched transfers shrink from days to minutes. Azimo was sold to Papaya Global in 2022.
Investing at Wealthify
Wealthify appointed him chief executive in July 2024, putting him in charge of a robo-investing service for savers inside one of Britain's largest insurers.
He once explained eBay at parties. He now explains investing to people who have never done it, the same task of making a new kind of service feel safe.
