SoFi Loses Three Top Execs

Social Finance, the online lender that goes by SoFi, was dealt another blow after three top executives said they are gearing up to leave the company.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Marketing Chief Joanne Bradford, Head of Risk Kevin Moss and Ashish Jain, the lender’s top capital markets executive, informed Chief Executive Anthony Noto that they would be leaving their roles. All three joined SoFi before Noto took over as CEO in the early part of last year.

Bradford is a former executive at Pinterest and Yahoo. She’s in charge of SoFi’s advertising efforts, which included Super Bowl commercials in 2016 and 2017.  Moss was formerly a risk executive at Wells Fargo. At SoFi he’s in charge of lending standards, reported The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Jain is the face of SoFi to banks that packaged its loans into securities. A spokesman for the online lender told the paper that during the past year it has hired 12 new executives.

Bradford will be succeeded by Lauren Stafford Webb, former Intuit executive, and Jennifer Nuckles, the former executive of Zynga. SoFi didn’t name a replacement for Jain, who is joining C2FO, the short-term business lender, or Moss, who is retiring.

The moves come as Sofi is facing a challenging loan market, with higher interest rates making it less attractive to refinance student loans or take out personal loans with SoFi. The company sells most of its loans to investors, which has been harder to do recently because delinquency rates for credit cards and other consumer loans are increasing. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that SoFi is keeping more of the loan securitizations on its own balance sheet, which enables it to earn more income and sell them potentially at higher prices down the road. It also has to take on the first losses if consumers miss payments at a rate that is higher than anticipated, noted the paper.

Under Noto’s charge, SoFi has been investing in different areas such as high-yield checking and no-fee exchange-traded funds, but those areas will take time before they are making SoFi money. In May it raised $500 million in venture funding. The round was led by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.