Vancouver-based Lendful, which allows borrowers to fill out a loan application within two minutes and receive their money within 24 hours, announced that Pat Forgione is joining the team as chief technology officer.
“Pat is Canada’s most experienced FinTech lending CTO. Bringing his technical and strategic experience into a startup is unprecedented,” said Lendful co-founder and CEO Alex Benjamin. “Having worked and collaborated with large financial institutions in his previous roles, having Pat on board places Lendful in the lead when it comes to management experience in the online lending space in Canada.”
“Security, privacy and compliance are the cornerstones of robust technical infrastructure.”
Before joining Lendful, Forgione spent three years as CTO of Thinking Capital, and acted as VP of technology at Peak Financial Services and senior manager of infrastructure operations and development
at Penson Financial Services. He founded and exited his financial services software provider company, Digital Finance, in 2010.
Benjamin said that Forgione joining the team is indicative of a growing trend of experienced financial professionals growing tired of the red tape of larger institutions. “Innovation is being crunched as a result,” he said. “For executives like our COO Mitch Salis and Pat Forgione CTO, they’re the kind of guys who are looking for cultures that reflect high performance, where a ‘startup mentality’ permeates everything the organisation does. That means getting things done, doing whatever it takes and executing with speed. They want to be part of an A-team.”
Earlier this year, Lendful announced that it raised $15 million from its partner Alterna Bank, who planned to use the funding to provide more loans to its customers and work with Alterna to offer better security and more competitive rates.
“Security, privacy and compliance are the cornerstones of robust technical infrastructure,” said Forgione, “What Lendful and our partner Alterna have already built is the first step in best-of-breed technology. I’m excited to be joining the company at a time when my experience will help Lendful build scalable solutions that provide our clients all the modern tools they deserve while ensuring world-class security and data integrity.”
Lendful’s platform uses online data to instantly assess risk, determine a credit rating and assign an appropriate interest rate, and receive an offer with no impact to the applicant’s credit score.
“When Pat and I met, he was very clear – he wanted to re-write the rules of banking using technology and common-sense,” said Benjamin. “He also wanted to have his name against changing the borrowing experiences for consumers across Canada. To him, that means being approved and funded in 3 clicks, not having to read and sign 20 pieces of paper. It’s wonderful to have him on board and we’re very excited as an organization.”