Lending Club CEO Named to Bloomberg Most Influential List

Bloomberg has just released their list of the 50 Most Influential figures for the fifth year in a row and Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche was named #28. Other big names on the list include Janet Yellen (#1), Elon Musk (#25), Jeff Bezos (#15), and even President Barack Obama (#6). The list itself is broken into six categories — Corporate Power Builders, Policy Shapers, Money Managers, Bankers, Tech Builders, and Thinkers — with Laplanche falling under the Tech Builder category.

Lending Club has seen huge growth since launching in 2007. As Bloomberg states in their write up of Laplanche, the company issued more loans in the second quarter of this year than they did in all of 2013. Recently the company surpassed $11 billion in loans since their inception. Although they have expanded from offering just personal loans into the worlds of small business loans and patient solutions, Laplanche has spoken enthusiastically about offering other forms of credit down the line.

“They build companies and assemble fortunes. They 
run banks, or hope to disrupt them. They shape economies and spread ideas. They manage money and wield the clout that goes with the billions of dollars they invest,” Bloomberg said in their introduction of the 2015 Most Influential List. This year’s list was compiled with nine industry experts assisting the magazine’s editorial staff at the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit. As the magazine explains, “To build our list each year, we start with a much larger universe of candidates, compiled with the help of Bloomberg News reporters and editors around the world. We also rely on the rankings, profiles, and cover stories we publish throughout the year in Bloomberg Markets. Then the magazine’s editors winnow it down, making the hard calls about who’s in and who’s out.” The magazine also says they the list favors recent accomplishments as opposed to lifetime achievements. Overall, this led to diverse selections, with the magazine noting, “The 50 people in our fifth annual Most Influential ranking are a varied group but have in common extraordinary success in their chosen fields”