There is a lot of speculation in this industry about the role of banks – how they view this industry and where they will fit in the future. In the latest edition of the Lend Academy Podcast my guest is someone who has a unique perspective on these questions. Frank Rotman is a partner at QED Investors, the leading venture capital firm in this space, but he also spent over a decade at Capital One. Frank is also the author of the new blog, Confessions of a Fintech Junkie, where he writes regularly about the broader fintech industry.

I first chatted with Michael Solomon back in 2011 when he was winding down his previous p2p lending business called Loanio. He was out of the industry for a couple of years but he never gave up on his desire to run a successful business in this industry and his second business, Circleback Lending, is starting to see some real success. So, I wanted to get him on the show to talk about the early days, his failure and what lessons he has taken from it that has helped with CircleBack.

There are many different loan choices out there today for small business owners. There are short term loans, merchant cash advances, asset-backed loans, equipment finance loans, SBA loans and many others. To help entrepreneurs sort through this myriad of loan choices and make the right financing decision is Lendio’s mission.

Cross River Bank is methodically building an integral place for themselves in the online lending ecosystem. They have become the goto bank for all new marketplace lending platforms. In this episode I talk with Cross River Bank founder and CEO Gilles Gade along with the their VP of Lending Adam Goller. We explore exactly how a bank like Cross River partners with the platforms and the services they provide. A lot of this is focused on compliance which is such an important topic for a young industry like ours.

Aaron Vermut, the CEO of Prosper, has presided over one of the most remarkable turnarounds in this industry’s short history. I have been wanting to get him on the podcast for some time and we were finally able to have a chat last week. In this extended interview he talks about the challenges of building Prosper, the latest developments and his vision for the future.

Rohit Arora, the CEO and Co-Founder of Biz2Credit has been quietly building one of the leading small business lending platforms in this country. If you haven’t heard their name much I can assure you that is going to change very soon. They have issued over $1.2 billion in small business loans to date and will do well over a billion dollars in loans in 2015.

Scott Langmack has been around P2P lending almost since the beginning. He first met Lending Club founder and CEO, Renaud Laplanche, back in 2007 and he became one of the largest investors on the platform as well as an equity investor in 2008. He started the very first fund in the space back in 2009 and he also produced an excellent educational webinar series. This series of videos formed the foundation of my knowledge when I started studying this industry.

This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast features Matt Burton, the CEO and Co-Founder of Orchard. Orchard has quickly become one of the leading companies in the marketplace lending space, developing the ecosystem that connects institutional investors with platforms quickly and easily. Because Matt talks to both platforms and investors on a daily basis he has a very interesting perspective on the whole industry.