Finitive, a private credit marketplace connecting borrowers with institutional investors, hired Todd Stokes, Ph.D., as its chief data officer. In his new role, Stokes will lead the formation of an analytics organization to leverage third-party and proprietary data, machine learning and algorithms to advance and accelerate how investors gain access to and lend to private credit borrowers on the Finitive platform.
“Todd is a leading data scientist who brings extensive knowledge of how to gather, evaluate and streamline high-quality data to deliver detailed and easy-to-consume transaction information to institutional investors,” Caroline Hayes, president and co-founder of Finitive, said. “This data-driven approach enables investors to match with borrowers at fair market terms quickly, easily and more cost-effectively than ever before.”
Stokes’ career spans the dimensions of data science, including data engineering, statistics and domain expertise. He spent four years developing software prior to graduate school, nine years performing predictive modeling research in cancer diagnostics and mobile health and eight years as an executive at financial technology companies, lenders and private equity firms.
Stokes has published extensively on machine learning algorithms, evaluating predictive models and effective visualization while earning his Ph.D. in bioengineering from Georgia Tech and Emory University. Stokes’ thesis applied machine learning to large volumes of medical data to support ethical real-time decision-making.
“Medical data and financial data are similar because they both involve high stakes. A seemingly insignificant artifact in a very large dataset, called an ‘outlier’ from a purely statistical perspective, can reveal an enormously costly problem with an artificial intelligence system. ‘Fail early and often’ is not a practical strategy for advancing technology in these fields,” Stokes said. “‘Investigate and cross-check every step using automation’ will be our methodology.”
Stokes was instrumental in building the analytics department as one of the first hires at Moneylion, a mobile bank that recently completed its IPO with a valuation of $2.4 billion. He later held senior positions at OnDeck Capital and served as vice president of risk and analytics at Miami-based investment firm 777 Partners, where he had oversight over multiple consumer lending portfolios.
“Finitive is playing a transformative role in turning private credit deal matching into an efficient, transparent digital process, leveraging data to simplify scoring, pricing, papering and closing,” Stokes said. “Finitive not only makes it possible for investors to source and underwrite deals in a fraction of the time, but also provides borrowers with the ability to connect with hundreds of potential investors and credit partners to fuel their growth.”
Stokes joined the Finitive executive team, joining a group that features recent hires Jon Burlinson (chief information and technology officer) and Joshua Masia (chief product officer).
“Having grown significantly in the past three years, Finitive now offers borrowers access to 1,000 institutional investors that are actively deploying capital across multiple asset classes and structures,” Jon Barlow, founder and CEO of Finitive, said. “As our platform scales, data science is increasingly central to our mission of bringing greater transparency and speed to direct lending transactions.”
