San Francisco based marketplace lender SoFi today announced the addition of Anshu Jain - Deutsche Bank's former co-Chief Executive Officer - to its team. Jain will begin as an adviser and will probably take a seat on the board in the coming months, according to Bloomberg.
Founded in September 2011, SoFi is a marketplace lender that provides student loan refinancing, mortgages and other types of loans to young professionals. The platform passed the $6 billion mark in cumulative lending last December and closed a $1 billion Series E investment round at a valuation of $4bn last October,.
Jain joins SoFi six months removed from his resignation from Deutsche Bank, where he spent 15 years in total - 4 as co-CEO, succeeding Josef Ackermann. Mr. Jain offered comment:
“It is a great pleasure to get involved with SoFi. As a rapidly growing leader in fintech, SoFi has become one of the most closely watched and dynamic forces in this evolving sector.”
Jain’s career path is not dissimilar to that of an increasing number of veteran executives from the traditional world of finance. Vikram Pandit - CEO of Citigroup from 2007 to 2012 - jumped aboard the fintech train with a series of financial-technology start-ups, including the likes of CommonBond, an online student-lending platform. Similarly, former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack has been sitting on the board of Lending Club since he left the bank. At the close of last year, the US’ second largest marketplace lender Prosper appointed Kunal Kaul - formerly Leader of Home Loans Originations Operations Excellence at Capital One - as its Executive Vice President of Operations. The list goes on.
According to the SoFi boss Mike Cagney, Jain will provide the platform with invaluable expertise in the development of future strategies as well as in forging ties with new capital-markets partners. He concluded:
“It was very serendipitous. We have a need, and he was available. I can’t think of a better person to fill that role.”
