A random collection of people met and statements heard at the LendIt Europe conference, day 1, October 20th, 2015.
Samir Desai, Cofounder and Director, Funding Circle: “We’re a marketplace, we don’t hold inventory, we don’t take any balance sheet risk, yet our interest is truly aligned with that of investors”
Aaron Vermut, CEO, Prosper: “P2P lending is a customer acquisition and conversion game… Retail lending was a way to build the business but retail only is not a possible option to build a lending business nowadays. “
Cormac Leec, Alternative Finance Director, Liberum: “Continental Europe originations will overtake the UK within five years.”
Karen Mills, former Administrator US Small Business Administration: “Crowdlending platforms struggle to acquire SME customers, thus they turn to banks”
Stefan Augustin, VP, Senior Credit Manager, Moody’s : “Where data is available, the performance history of crowdlenders has not been very different from other SME lenders’”
Luc Hardy, President, Sagax: “I have been an investor in high tech for 25 years. But being an investor in Lending Club since it started in 2006 is very special: it’s exciting to feel one participated in the creation of an entire new sector.”
John Sun, Cofounder& Chief Credit Officer, AvantCredit: “50% of our loans are approved without any human intervention”
Jerome LeLuel, Global Risk Chief Officer, Funding Circle : “Risk has the same definition in alternative finance as in traditional finance… Even if we don’t own the risk, we carry it as a reputation risk.”
Angela Ceresnie, Founder & CFO, Orchard: “There are more and more service providers in the ecosystem of crowdlending and p2plending. “
Cedric Tessier, cofounder and CEO, Finexkap, “In France only 3% of SMEs use factoring, against 19% in the UK… We have a huge untapped market of 600,000 SMEs.”
Olivier Goy, founder & CEO, Lendix, “There are tons of FinTech events but LendIt is truly international. It’s the place to be to think about the future of this industry.”
Paul Jochen Ebert, VP Product & Marketing, Borro; “We lend to affluent borrowers whose valuable assets like luxury watches and collector cars are not accounted for by traditional lenders.”
Giles Andrews, Cofounder and Executive Chairman, Zopa. “Being at this conference today with people bursting with energy, it feels like it all happened overnight, it does not feel like it took us 10 years to build this industry.”
Therese Torris is an entrepreneur and consultant in eFinance and eCommerce based in Paris. She has covered crowdfunding and P2P lending since the early days when Zopa was created in the United Kingdom. She was a director of research and consulting at Gartner Group Europe, Senior VP at Forrester Research and Content VP at Twenga. She publishes a French personal finance blog, Le Blog Finance Pratique and curates crowdfunding news on Scoop.It.
