Reporting to the company’s chief executive, David Hosking, Mr Beard will lead a fast-growing team of software engineers, developers and system administrators at Tusker. He joins the company from a software specialist that specialises in integrated solutions for the luxury retail market and where he was head of IT development.

In his new role, Mr Beard will be responsible for the development of Tusker’s back office systems that support both the contract hire and salary sacrifice fleets, and for the continued development of the front-end customer-facing websites and underlying architecture.

‘I see this very much as a new challenge,’ said Mr Beard. ‘Tusker has big expansion plans and, to be able to facilitate that expansion, we need to have in place the robust systems and IT infrastructure capable of supporting large numbers of vehicles and drivers.

‘The company is quite unusual in that it has developed its own systems over time and many of them are highly developed, but there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure all the processes and policies are in place and are as efficient as possible. And we need to continue to develop the customer-facing end of our systems to ensure they are as attractive as possible from a B2C perspective,’ he said.

Commenting on the new appointment, CEO David Hosking said: ‘Andrew brings a wealth of specialist IT knowledge and experience to Tusker at a time when we are making great strides towards fulfilling our ambitious growth plans.

‘We expect him to play a key role in the continued development of both our back office and our front end systems to ensure they stay at the cutting edge of development within the fleet market and ahead of our competition,’ he added.