Angela Ceresnie

Co-founder and COO at Orchard Platform

New York City, New York

@aceresnie | LinkedIn Profile

You have the pedigree many on Wall Street would be envious of: Masters in Engineering from University of Michigan and over 7 years working for two high profile Wall Street banks in the City. Yet you walked away voluntarily. How did you come to this decision?

During the time I discovered Marketplace Lending, I was running the Small Business underwriting and analytics team at Citibank. Prior to that, I worked in consumer underwriting at American Express—I have been fortunate to receive top-notch training in terms of appreciating and understanding risk. However, making the decision to walk away was not easy. In my initial personal participation in marketplace lending, I was able to take that knowledge and combine it with this interesting, newly available (to retail investors) data and build a model that I found to be superior. That access and excitement along with meeting my other co-founders boosted my confidence to leave the Wall Street banks in order to do something different that I could personally impact.

Do you consider yourself a natural entrepreneur or is this something you came to realize after meeting your co-founder Matt Burton?

In my case, the intimidating nature of being a first-time entrepreneur was certainly minimized by the knowledge that Matt, David, Jon and I shared a unified vision and passion for the business we were seeking to build. Leaving a traditional financial institution to start a business in an emerging market was undoubtedly daunting, but that fear was met with an even greater exhilaration by the opportunity to shape and improve the future of credit.

Do you find it somewhat ironic the idea for your startup came over a discussion with Matt over another FinTech disruptor (Lending Club)? Can you elaborate on how the idea formulated for the company?

I don’t think it’s ironic that we founded Orchard over a discussion about another fintech disruptor. For me, it’s telling of the challenges of that time and how overall access to credit was being disrupted—this created the opportunity for Orchard to take shape. When I discovered Lending Club in 2011, I was immediately attracted by three unique factors:

• They distribute 100% of their loans - taking no balance sheet risk;
• Each loan is distributed at the loan level - enabling any type of investor to pick and choose what they want to invest in; and
• They make their historical loan book and performance publically available for investors to analyze.

For the first time in modern banking history—I, a retail investor, was able to invest in a loan made directly to another person with full transparency into the borrower’s credit and financial data—the same data that was available to me in my current and past positions, running underwriting departments at banks.

Upon discovering this data, I followed my first instinct—build a credit model and make some nice returns. I loved the diversity that this represented in my own personal portfolio, not to mention the yield. As I continued to research the new market, I realized how truly revolutionary it was and that there was an opportunity to service institutional investors who wanted to participate in marketplace lending at scale.

How would you describe the first year of being a startup founder (you used the term rollercoaster)?

The first year with Orchard felt like a roller coaster—everything moved faster than we expected. Suddenly, a group of individuals rely on you to guide the company in the right direction and it’s your job to make sure the organization doesn’t veer off track, a task that is simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. The first year of a quickly growing startup comes with many thrilling victories shared amongst a group of people who can all revel in shared success. It is also accompanied by less glamorous realities such as taking the trash out at the end of the day.

How has your role evolved at Orchard now that the company has seen such early success?

Today, my role at Orchard consists of running everything related to operations. From Human Resources to Finance to Client Services—it is my responsibility to make sure the business runs smoothly and efficiently and is done so in a way that is always in keeping with our values. This has been the core of my role since Orchard’s inception in 2013, what has changed, however, is the day to day. As we have grown, we have been lucky enough to bring on intelligent and talented people who own each function and allow their team to be more effective.

Would you consider going back to working for an established institution now that you’ve helped found a company?

Not at this time. Orchard has definitely brought out the entrepreneur in me

Forbes headline in their profile of Orchard Platform asked “Is this the next Moody’s?” — a nice compliment. What specific service gaps does Orchard address? Why didn’t the established players solve this in your opinion?

Orchard has always been a technology-first company. We don’t originate loans and we do not touch borrowers—instead our platform supports operational efficiencies that help institutional investors, investment managers and loan originators connect and transact. Our goal is to always be the first to build the products that will allow our customers to participate in marketplace lending. When we realized that institutions wanted to participate in marketplace lending as an asset class but had no scalable system to use, we created a technology that was transparent, efficient and user-friendly to fill that gap. While we very much appreciate the compliment, we’re not sure it gives the right impression. We are not looking to be a ratings or analytics agency, we are looking to do more than that.

Who(m) do you believe has had the most influence with respect to your own career?

I can attribute much of my management style to Tina Reich, chief risk officer and chief data scientist at Credibly (formerly with CitiBank and American Express). Transparency is key in marketplace lending, and Tina’s transparency as a leader in the fintech space is something that enables people to effectively work towards business goals.

What do you see as the 3 leading future trends for FinTech?

Data standardization has been a big topic of discussion amongst industry participants as it attracts an increasingly diverse set of originators, financial products, sources of capital, and transaction types. Given these growing complexities, I think that we’ll see big strides made on development of clear standards in 2016. Moreover, I think that Orchard is uniquely positioned to play a large role in creating such standards given the wide range of industry participants with whom we interact as well as our experience in working with data and building scalable data processing technology.

 

More about Orchard Platform:

Orchard Platform is a technology and data provider for marketplace lending. Orchard supports operational efficiencies to help institutional investors, investment managers and loan originators connect and transact. Founded in New York City in 2013, Orchard’s mission is to build the systems that will allow marketplace lending to efficiently grow into a global financial market. Orchard enables institutional investors and investment managers to allocate capital to marketplace lending, with best practices, manager identification, portfolio benchmarking and strategic access to supply. Orchard helps originators across multiple asset classes diversify their capital structure with marketplace lending distribution, and provides market insights, scalable infrastructure and reporting to enable originators to focus on making loans and giving borrowers more choices. Orchard has been named to Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups list and is recognized for its technical and analytical thought leadership as explored on its blog.