Online lenders are growing their presence in Washington with the hire of lobbyist Nat Hoopes to lead the Marketplace Lenders Association.
Hoopes is currently executive director of the Financial Services Forum trade group, but will make the leap over to the fintech body next month.
Formed earlier this year the Marketplace Lenders Association counts Lending Club, Prosper Marketplace and Funding Circle among its founding members.
Hoopes joins at an important time for the peer-to-peer lending companies as regulators consider how best to respond to these new business models that have quickly come to prominence.
The industry is also facing increased uncertainty with Orchard Platform revealing a 34% quarter-on-quarter decline in the total value of new online loans in Q2 2016.
This comes along with damaged investor confidence in online loans following the ousting of Lending Clubs CEO Renaud Laplanche in May after an internal probe into a botched loan sale revealed weak controls.
In the Chinese market the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) recently imposed strict rules limiting how much an individual or company can raise through the platforms, after the country’s leading player Ezubao was revealed to be a Ponzi scheme in February.
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