Former Zopa and CapitalOne Heavyweight Joins Oodle Car Finance

Oodle Car Finance, the visionary company changing the way people buy used cars, today announced the appointment of Andrew Lawson as Chief Product Officer. The hire of the former Zopa and CapitalOne heavyweight comes on the back of the firm recently closing its £350m asset-backed securitisation (ABS).

Andrew joins from Zopa, the world’s first peer to peer lender, and one of the latest digital banks, where he held the position of Chief Product Officer for the past 5 years, responsible for business growth across lending and investing, including the origination and performance of unsecured and secured car loans. Prior to that, he held several senior positions at Oliver Wyman, Capital One Bank and Experian, specialising in driving data driven customer value growth across consumer businesses.

Founder and CEO at Oodle Car Finance Jonny Clayton comments: “Andrew joins the company at a truly exciting time in our journey. His experience will enable us to continue to advance and build a world class customer proposition that support our dealer partners resp0nd to changing retail demands and opportunities. We continue to build on the success and market penetration achieved since our launch 3 years ago. We’re on our way to achieving £1bn of total lending now and our hyper-growth business continues its investment in our proprietary technology platform, to position at the forefront of driving change and our mission to make car buying and ownership simple and accessible to all.

As a leader who brings insight, strategy and a successful track record in managing high-growth, Andrew will head up our 80-strong product and engineering teams. He will be instrumental in driving advancements in our product and technologies as we steer change in the UK’s largest retail market and enable our network of dealers to deliver a game-changing retail experience.”

With over 19 years of experience in consumer analytics and lending, Andrew is passionate about bringing simple and fair products and services to customers through teams that make great decisions at pace. Commenting on his appointment Andrew says: “I’ve had some great career highlights so far – including growing Zopa from £20m lending per month to profitability and becoming the UK’s largest online open market lender, with more than £100m lending per month.

I’m ready for a new challenge though and Oodle Car Finance is in a great position to experience real growth trajectory in their mission to make car buying a 21st century experience. They’ve funded £660m of car finance to more than 50,000 UK customers in the last 3 years and in the last 12 months alone, applications have increased by 330 percent – a phenomenal achievement. There’s plenty of work to crack on with here as we scale up to second-gear growth.”