InDebted names Chris McNamara CEO and Brendan Lee CFO

InDebted has appointed Chris McNamara as Chief Executive Officer and Brendan Lee as Chief Financial Officer, effective 1 October.

The leadership changes follow an external search launched after founder Josh Foreman stepped down as chief executive earlier this year. He remains with the company as Founder and Executive Director, responsible for product and artificial intelligence.

McNamara joins from Advanced Navigation, where he was Chief Revenue Officer. Earlier, he held go-to-market leadership roles at Remote and Glassdoor across the United States, Europe and Australia.

Lee joins from Morgan Stanley, where he was Managing Director and Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunications for Australia and New Zealand. He has also held roles at Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Group and McKinsey & Company.

The appointments follow what InDebted described as its strongest revenue year, with group revenue up 42% year on year. The company operates in six regions and offers four products across different stages of the collections process.

Leadership shift

Foreman founded InDebted in 2016 and led the business as Chief Executive Officer until the earlier management change. Under the revised structure, McNamara oversees day-to-day operations, including finance, sales and go-to-market functions, while Foreman leads strategy, product, engineering and AI transformation.

The search focused on finding an executive with experience scaling businesses in regulated markets. McNamara's appointment completes that process, while Lee adds senior finance and banking experience to the management team.

InDebted supports the collections lifecycle through four products: Receive for early-stage first-party collections, Collect for third-party collections, Release for later-stage recovery and portfolio work, and Comply for cross-border compliance. Release and Comply are the newest additions to its product line-up.

Executive remarks

Foreman commented on the appointments in a statement.

"Chris and Brendan are exactly the calibre of operators I'd hoped we'd find. Bringing them on is a genuine reflection of how far this business has come, and I'm confident they're the right team to lead it into its next chapter," said Josh Foreman, Founder, InDebted.

McNamara set out his view of the company's market position.

"InDebted has built agentic technology that runs across the entire collections lifecycle to disrupt a sector that hasn't seen innovation for years. It's already redefining the collections experience for consumers and delivering a step-change in economic outcomes for our clients, and I'm excited to help scale that impact further and faster," said Chris McNamara, Chief Executive Officer, InDebted.

Lee said the move marked a shift from advisory work to an operating role.

"I've admired InDebted's progress for years and share Josh's vision for where the business could go. Taking on an operating role after a career in investment banking is a big shift, but the opportunity to help build a category-defining, world-class business out of Australia, with genuinely global reach, is one I couldn't pass up," said Brendan Lee, Chief Financial Officer, InDebted.

The company has framed the management reshuffle as part of a broader effort to separate operating leadership from product and AI development. Foreman has said the change will allow him to focus more directly on rebuilding parts of the business around advances in AI.

"At my core, I am a builder. InDebted started with me writing the first line of code. Over the last decade I have necessarily stepped away from that work to build the organisation. But what is happening in AI right now demands that technical founders go back to their roots - not to retreat from the business, but to refound it. To take everything we know about the domain, the customer and the operations, and rebuild on a fundamentally different foundation," said Josh Foreman, Founder, InDebted.