About

Conor French began his career in the Los Angeles and New York offices of Latham & Watkins as an attorney in the firm’s corporate department and capital markets practice group. As general counsel at Funding Circle, he brought his corporate law experience and passion for social entrepreneurship to what was, at the time, a small and sanguine start-up. Despite operating in a heavily-regulated environment, with significant barriers to entry, it has grown rapidly to become the world’s leading marketplace for business financing. French has steadfastly championed clear self-regulating industry standards in his role at Funding Circle. For instance, in August 2015, he co-authored and introduced the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights, which identified fundamental financing rights that all small businesses deserve. Those rights were developed to promote transparency and fairness and to protect small businesses from predatory practices that have become common in the underserved small business lending market. In addition, in April 2016, he co-authored a first-ever marketplace lending code of business conduct in connection with founding the Marketplace Lending Association, a trade association that supports the responsible growth of the Fintech industry and fosters innovation in the financial system. A nominator highlights that French is ‘relentlessly focused on what his company needs. He brings a rare combination of top-shelf legal acumen and an intuitive sense of the priorities of his business. Even in the throes of crisis, he is level-headed, wanting to see options, and then decisive when it’s time to move forward. It’s for this reason that so many recognise him as a star of the fintech legal community’. The coming of age of peer-to-peer or marketplace lending was also a harbinger of heightened government scrutiny and attention. The result is a current macro-regulatory environment for Fintech that can pose significant challenges to the growth of Funding Circle and other financial innovators. In order to overcome these challenges, French focused on designing a resilient and flexible regulatory architecture for Funding Circle, capable of protecting the business while also preserving its velocity and growth. This approach ‘required, for example, parting ways with a tried-and-true origination model of partnering with a chartered bank; instead, we opted for a state-by-state licensing’. It also required developing and implementing diverse capital formation structures to broaden the investor base. French highlights that a general counsel should ‘always be on the lookout for ways to do more with less. Things move at light speed in growing companies and you’re never going to keep pace if you aren’t constantly reorienting yourself around your “highest value uses of time.” I’ve managed to grow up with my company through effective delegation, intrapreneurship, and ruthless prioritisation… move on to something that matters. And don’t look back’. Recently, French left Funding Circle and moved to a new innovative drone aviation company specialising in medical supply delivery in remote areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. He will undoubtedly bring his legal and corporate skill as well as his passion to this new opportunity.