The impact of Morgan Stanley’s ex-CEO in LendingClub!

As entrepreneur and CEO at a Fintech company, Kantox, I was very glad to read that John Mack, “Mack the knife”, Morgan Stanley’s ex-CEO, became part of Lending Club’s Board of Directors and decided to invest USD 2,500,000 of his own in that company. That was August 2012. A guy who once was the top executive at one of the largest banks in the world was joining a Fintech company that had not even reached 1 Billion transactions in 6 years, that is, a drop in the ocean…

I might be wrong, but it is hard to imagine an ex-CEO or top executive of a leading European bank joining a Fintech company. And this is probably the largest difference between Europe and United States in terms of innovation. It is probably due to cultural reasons, but the main advantage of United States is its capacity to attract top-level senior profiles to young companies that are then enabled to grow significantly faster.

Let’s go through the events in further detail:

• Summer 2012: John Mack joins Lending Club.
• November 2012: Lending Club reaches its 1^st Billion transacted (after 6 years).
• May 2013: Google invests USD 125 Million in Lending Club.
• June 2013 (7 months later): Lending Club reaches its 2^nd Billion transacted, which means that in 7 months it has been able to generate the same volume of transactions as in its past 6 years.
• July 2013: 2 banks, Titan Bank and Congressional Bank, start using Lending Club’s platform as an additional channel to perform transactions.

It is obviously impossible to measure the role that John Mack played in the growth of the company, in the arrival of Titan Bank and Congressional Bank, or in Google’s investment. However, there is no doubt that the impact for Lending Club in terms of credibility has been extraordinary; for customers, investors and media. It meant a voting trust for an industry, the Fintech, in search of more visibility and credibility.

In the next 20 years, the financial industry will change dramatically. With new generations that were born online, and the possibility to sell without a physical and costly network, Fintech companies have a promising future ahead of them. So now, the question is: “Will Europe be able to create leading Fintech companies, or will it be the United States which will lead this change, one more time?”

Bankers, Europeans included, made a mistake when they took exorbitant risk with speculative products… now it is time to take risks with something that creates real value, the Fintech companies.