RateSetter’s former chief risk officer joins The Money Platform
THE MONEY Platform has hired RateSetter’s first-ever chief risk officer Kevin Allen (pictured) to head up its credit decision processes and grow its borrower base.
Allen joined the recently-launched peer-to-peer payday lender on Monday 23 January, after three-and-a-half years at RateSetter.
Joshua Graham, co-founder of The Money Platform, told Peer-to-Peer Finance News that Allen is “entirely responsible for the credit decision engine – who we lend to and who we reject”, as well as being tasked with scaling up the lender’s borrower volume.
Allen joined RateSetter – which is one of the ‘big three’ P2P lenders – as CRO in July 2013 and went on to become head of retail lending. He helped to increase lending from £3m to £60m per month and was instrumental in growing the provision fund from under £1m to £23m, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Prior to RateSetter, Allen held credit risk roles at a number of blue-chip businesses including MasterCard, LloydsTSB and PwC.
While RateSetter has matured into one of the industry’s largest players, The Money Platform is still very much in the start-up phase. It officially launched just before Christmas and Graham said that it has received around 5,000 registrations for loans.
The Money Platform is the UKs first fully-authorised P2P payday lender and was put in the Financial Conduct Authority’s Project Innovate incubator programme, which supports innovative fintech start-ups.
The firm is looking to shake up what it calls the “morally bankrupt” payday loan market, by offering a more ethical alternative. With a representative APR of 165 per cent, it is much less expensive than some of the big-name payday lenders in the market.
Read more: Payday loan requests double in first week of January
RateSetter’s risk team has seen some turnaround in recent months. In early December, the Financial Times reported that its chief risk officer Cyrille Salle de Chou had left the company after just six months to join HSBC.
Later that month, the platform announced that former PayPal UK executive Michael Hoare had been appointed head of risk analytics and retail credit.
