Renaud Laplanche (born 1970) is a French-American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

and

business executive A business executive is a person responsible for running an organization, although the exact nature of the role varies depending on the organization. Executives run companies or government agencies. They create plans to help their organizations gr ...

. He is the co-founder and CEO of the fintech company, Upgrade, Inc. Prior to founding the company, Laplanche co-founded and served as the CEO of Lending Club, an American

peer-to-peer lending Peer-to-peer lending, also abbreviated as P2P lending, is the practice of loan, lending money to individuals or businesses through online services that match lenders with borrowers. Peer-to-peer lending companies often offer their services online ...

company, for a decade. Before his tenure at Lending Club, he also co-founded and led TripleHop Technologies, the maker of the MatchPoint software, which was subsequently acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

Early life and education

Renaud Laplanche was born in 1970 and grew up in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. He was interested in sailing and raced competitively on the national level, winning the French sailing championships on

Laser A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word ''laser'' originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radi ...

s, 13.5 ft, one-sail, one-man sailboats, in 1988 and 1990. Laplanche studied business and law. He received a post-graduate DESS-DJCE ( J.D.) degree in Tax and Corporate Law from Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France, and an

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a professional degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration; elective courses may allow further study in a particular a ...

degree from HEC Business School in Paris, France, and

London Business School London Business School (LBS) is a business school and a constituent college of the federal University of London. LBS was founded in 1964 and awards post-graduate degrees (Master's degree, Master's degrees in management and finance, Master of B ...

Career

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

From 1995 to 1999, Laplanche worked as a securities lawyer and senior associate at the law offices of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. He initially worked in Parisand later moved to New York. During his tenure, Laplanche handled various cases involving mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and investment transactions involving technology companies.

TripleHop Technologies

In New York, Laplanche soon left the law offices and, in 1999, co-founded a software company named TripleHop Technologies with Franck Nazikian. The company operated from an office located in the North Tower of the New York World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

. TripleHop suffered major losses, including its computers and recently developed software code. In 2003 TripleHop launched its MatchPoint crawler and search engine for enterprise content. The engine provided a single search point for

structured Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking jargon, is the practice of executing financial transactions such as making bank deposits in a specific pattern, calculated to avoid triggering financial institutions to file reports required by law ...

and

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically plain text, text-heavy, but may contain data such ...

(databases, e-mail, file and document systems, the internet), used

Support Vector Machine In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised max-margin models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laborato ...

algorithms for indexing and concept-based retrieval, and collaborative filtering for correlating related topics, created a user profile for each user on the basis of user's search history to tailor query results to particular users, and permitted context-sensitive search where queries were expanded by synonyms from domain-specific thesaurus-type taxonomies. MatchPoint was adopted by many U.S. media companies ( CNN,

Turner Broadcasting Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. was an American television and media conglomerate founded by Ted Turner in 1965. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, it merged with Time Warner (later WarnerMedia) on October 10, 1996. As of April 2022, all of its ass ...

, AOL, ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...

'',

ABC News ABC News most commonly refers to: * ABC News (Australia), a national news service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation * ABC News (United States), a news-gathering and broadcasting division of the American Broadcasting Company ABC News may a ...

Dow Jones Dow Jones is a combination of the names of business partners Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Dow Jones & Company Dow, Jones and Charles Bergstresser founded Dow Jones & Company in 1882. That company eventually became a subsidiary of News Corp, an ...

, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' and others) as their preferred search engine and attracted the attention of major software vendors. In June 2005, TripleHop Technologies was acquired by

and MatchPoint was integrated with Oracle's other products. Laplanche reportedly earned 10 million USD from the acquisition. He moved to California and from June 2005 to October 2006 worked at Oracle as the Head of Product Management, Search Technologies, managing integration and overseeing sales of search engine products.

LendingClub

In 2006 Laplanche left Oracle and co-founded LendingClub. He had gotten the idea for the new company when he started TripleHop and found that his credit card carried an 18% interest rate, while he was only earning 1.5% from the bank on high yield certificates of deposit. He thought that by connecting investors directly with borrowers, he could cut the banks out of the equation and deliver lower rates for borrowers and higher returns for investors.Lending Club CEO on Getting a Loan Without a Bank

CNBC CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Day ...

14 March 2013. Retrieved 16 March, 2103 LendingClub first launched on Facebook to leverage existing connections among users for testing users' trust and willingness to help one another financially, and to gather user feedback about the new service. At that time, LendingClub was one of Facebook's first applications. In 2010, after receiving $12 million in funding from venture capital investors, Laplanche developed LendingClub into a full-scale person-to-person lending company. By June 2012, the company had raised $100 million in venture capital. LendingClub completed its IPO on December 10, 2014. The stock price increased 56% on its first day of trading. On May 9, 2016, Laplanche resigned from his position as CEO following an internal investigation that found a violation of the company's business practices. Laplanche later entered into an agreement with the SEC to settle the issue with no admission of responsibility.

Upgrade

In August 2016, Laplanche along with other former Lending Club executives started the fintech company, Upgrade, Inc. The company provides credit and mobile banking products. Upgrade has raised over $122 million in venture capital from several investors. In November 2021, Upgrade grew 83% in valuation over four months to $6.28 billion after raising $280 million in a Series F funding round led by Coatue Management and DST Global.

Recognition

Laplanche was named Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2012 BFM Awards. He was the winner of HEC Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2002 and again in 2014. and is a member of the Young Presidents' Organization. In 2013 he received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Northern California region and was a national finalist. In September 2020, Laplanche was named Fintech Executive of the Year by Finovate.

Personal life

Since April 2015, Laplanche and co-skipper Ryan Breymaier have held the speed record for sailing from

Newport, Rhode Island Newport is a seaside city on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, United States. It is located in Narragansett Bay, approximately southeast of Providence, Rhode Island, Providence, south of Fall River, Massachusetts, south of Boston, and nort ...

Bermuda Bermuda is a British Overseas Territories, British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean. The closest land outside the territory is in the American state of North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. Bermuda is an ...

in 23 hours, 9 minutes, and 52 seconds at the average speed of 27 knots. Between April 1 and September 22, 2015, Laplanche and the crew of the ''Lending Club 2'', a 105-ft maxi-trimaran, held the speed record for sailing from Cowes to Dinard across the

English Channel The English Channel, also known as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Southern England from northern France. It links to the southern part of the North Sea by the Strait of Dover at its northeastern end. It is the busi ...

. Between July 15, 2015, and May 17, 2017, Laplanche also held the Transpac record between Long Beach, CA and the Diamond Head lighthouse in

Oahu, Hawaii Oahu (, , sometimes written Oahu) is the third-largest and most populated island of the Hawaiian Islands and of the U.S. state of Hawaii. The state capital, Honolulu, is on Oahu's southeast coast. The island of Oahu and the uninhabited Northw ...

with 3 days, 8 hours, and 9 seconds.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Laplanche, Renaud Living people American financial businesspeople American business executives American chief executives of financial services companies 1970 births HEC Paris alumni Businesspeople from San Francisco French financial businesspeople French chief executives People associated with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton