Leading marketplace lender Lending Club nabs new president from PayPal

Lending Club poaches PayPal man Steve Allocca.

Lending Club, the largest marketplace lender in the US, has hired Steve Allocca (pictured) as its new president. Allocca joins Lending Club from PayPal, where he ran the firm’s global credit business, spanning both consumer and business lending products.

Allocca led PayPal’s expansion into business lending through PayPal Working Capital, which lent more than $3bn to over 115,000 businesses globally since launching in September 2013.

In his role as president, Allocca will have oversight on all product lines, including personal loans, auto loans, small business loans and patient solutions. He will report to CEO Scott Sanborn, who took the reins in the summer of last year, shortly after the dismissal of former boss Renaud Laplanche.

Allocca will join Lending Club on 22 May 2017. In a statement, he said that the opportunity at Lending Club is massive, with no other technology-oriented lender holding ten years’ worth of insight and data from both investors and borrowers.

“In the more than four years I spent at PayPal, we established PayPal Global Credit as a strategic product offering through innovative analysis of both market and company data and by personalizing our approach to borrowers,” said Allocca.

Prior to joining PayPal, where he worked for four and a half years, Allocca founded and ran a $330m loan portfolio analytics and management firm called Loan Science, LLC. He has also served as president and COO of Education Finance Partners.

Lending Club posted its fourth consecutive quarterly loss in the first quarter of 2016, but is widely considered to be in a more stable position now than it was for much of 2016. Sanborn has said that demand for its loans is now back on track, with capital increasingly coming from banks.

Commenting on the Allocca hire, Sanborn didn’t hold back: “Steve joins at an incredible moment – we have strong demand from investors, a customer base of nearly two million borrowers, a powerful brand, an incredible technology platform, and much of the $3.5 trillion U.S. consumer loan market remains untouched by online lending platforms.”