Fintech Revolutionary

Speaker Series: Mike Cagney,
Co-Founder & CEO, Figure Technologies, Inc
Co-Founder & Former CEO, SoFi (Social Finance, Inc)

Breakfast, Monday, 17 June 2019, 08:00-10:00 am, The Hong Kong Club

GSBer Mike Cagney Just Can’t Stop Reinventing the Financial Wheel

From Creating the Student Loan Refinancing Market & Empowering Overlooked Millennial Customers to Changing How Securitized Assets are Sourced, Funded and Acquired…

Event Details:
Mr. Richard Hext on behalf of The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong is pleased to invite you a special breakfast with MIKE CAGNEY, founder of Figure Technologies, Inc. (www.figure.com) and earlier founder of SoFi/Social Finance, Inc (www.sofi.com), the online lender that “created it all” by identifying high-potential millennials and providing them with the thing they needed first and most, refinancing of their onerous student loans.

Mike has made a career out of identifying gaps in the financial markets.

While in his Stanford GSB entrepreneurship class, Mike realized that none of his classmates were high-credit risks, but that banks treated them as such, denying them credit and extending student loans at unnecessarily high rates.

From such insights mighty oaks grew. Or, in this case, SoFi and, later, Figure Technologies, Inc.

SoFi not only created the student loan refinancing market, but realized this same mispriced, overlooked constituency were great customers for a whole suite of financial products that could grow with them as their own careers and prospects took off. They were baptised “HENRYS” (high earners not rich yet) and the idea of targeting them was, at the time, revolutionary. SoFi is, today, 8 years later, consistently one of the top 10 issuers of AAA asset-backed securities in the states with more than 700,000+ members/borrowers. Out of USD 22 billion in student loans issued since its founding, it has an extraordinarily low default rate of 21 basis points (USD 46 MM). It has originated another USD 14.7 billion in personal loans – all at some of the lowest cost of customer acquisition, lowest rates of defaults and highest rates of customer cross-referrals of any financial institution anywhere.

Today, SoFi is valued at USD 4.8 billion and hopes to go public in the next 1 to 2 years.

Mike’s newest venture, FIGURE, turbocharges these insights.

It all began with a question. “Why were SoFi’s securitized asset sales so time and labor intensive?” requiring hundred-plus person team laboring months to repackage SoFi’s high quality loans and sell them to the asset-backed and wholesale loan purchasing markets.

At the same time, one of SoFi’s key credit products – mortgages – led to a second insight. Here was a constituency, much like HENRYs, that were overpriced and under-served – “CLARES” (cash light and rich in equity individuals), “asset trapped” individuals with too much equity in their homes, but no way to “release it” other than selling their homes.

The marriage of these two insights led to FIGURE, which was created to democratize and accelerate the marketplace of home equity solutions.

But along the way, the company created a platform, the Provenance blockchain (www.provenance.io), that could apply these same tools to reducing cost, friction and time for securitized credits of almost any kind, from almost any market, taking 100+ basis points of cost out of the system at the same time.

Today, FIGURE can provide home equity loans and home equity lines of credit in as little as 5 days. It is on track to achieve profitability faster than almost any other fintech start-up today, less than 18 months after founding. More than USD 120 MM in equity has been raised to pursue this challenge. FIGURE’s partners include some of the world’s most important financial institutions, from Jefferies (which just committed to put USD 1 billion in warehouse financing on the Provenance blockchain) to Black Rock to Apollo to Barclays to BAML to Franklin Templeton to Credit Suisse to

Where does Mike see FIGURE and Provenance going? Why has his blockchain initiative gotten so much traction where others have floundered? How has he mobilized so many of the his blue chip credit supplier and credit buyers from SoFi to support him in this new venture and use the Provenance Blockchain. What, in the blockchain world, is the key difference between a “great insight” and a great solution that works and gets adopted? Where does he see the next applications for blockchain in finance going?

The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong could not be more pleased to have you join us for this event and to hear directly from one of fintech’s most important visionaries and pioneers. We look forward to seeing you there.

Speaker’s Bio: Mike Cagney