Local fintech company JUMO has appointed Chris Pinkham as an active independent director of the company, effective immediately.

According to JUMO, Pinkham has joined its board of directors and will work with the leadership team on technical and product strategy.

Pinkham is known as the man who conceived of and co-built the earliest incarnation of Amazon Web Services' public cloud service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), while at Amazon.com in 2006. He ran the company's global network and systems engineering division as VP of engineering.

Pinkham left his previous role as vice-president of engineering at Twitter in February 2017, according to JUMO.

"Chris is an Internet and cloud pioneer," says Andrew Watkins-Ball, founder and CEO of JUMO. "We are building large-scale, high impact technology teams and Chris brings an awesome combination of creativity and scars to the table."

Cape Town-based JUMO helps mobile network operators grow their mobile money ecosystems by integrating them with financial services. It partners with large digital footprint holders, such as mobile network operators, to deliver a new generation of financial services to customers who need instant access to working capital, savings and other financial services.

"JUMO is a special company on an important mission to bring high quality and affordable financial services to underserved communities. I'm excited and looking forward to assisting in whatever way I can," says Pinkham.

Pinkham has a career spanning over 30 years in various technology roles. In 1993, he co-founded SA's first ISP, Internet Africa, which was sold to UUNET Technologies in 1996. In 2008, he co-founded Nimbula, a high-profile infrastructure software start-up acquired by Oracle in 2013. Thereafter, he led Oracle's development team responsible for public cloud services before joining Twitter in February 2015.

Born in Singapore, Pinkham is a graduate of the University of Cape Town.

Earlier this year, JUMO appointed Warren Squires as the company's director of its MTN Channel.

According to the company, Squires, former CIO at Barclays Africa Seeker Fund, leads JUMO's strategic partnership with MTN in Africa. He is a global investment banking executive with 20 years' experience working in various finance company leadership roles.