Today Figure Technologies announced that Asiff Hirji joined the firm as President following its December funding round in which it raised $103 million. Figure built the Provenance blockchain for tokenization and debt securitization. Its current focus is the mortgage and student loan markets.
Hirji was COO at Coinbase during a high growth 18 month period through to May 2019. During that time, the company passed $1 billion in revenue and $8 billion in valuation. Before that, he spent a year at venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Until last month, for eight years Hirji was on the board of Rentpath, which runs numerous property rental listing sites and is part-owned by TPG Capital. That experience may prove useful with Figure’s current focus on property finance.
“Asiff has already been a critical advisor to me on how we manage the growth of Figure in order to drive the transformation of financial services across categories and around the world,” said Mike Cagney, CEO and Co-Founder of Figure.
“His deep experience in the financial services industry and his long history of helping companies drive and manage growth are both going to be important to the growth of Figure and the creation of our new merchant bank.”
Cagney previously founded student loan company SoFi which is also a unicorn.
“The opportunity now is to scale to more financial products and open this capability to all financial institutions,” said Hirji.
Figure started extending mortgages and claims to currently be the fourth largest home equity line of credit (HELOC) provider in the U.S. That’s in part because it offers loan approval within five minutes and fund transfers within five days. The Provenance platform is not intended for use by Figure alone. Currently, Caliber Home Loans also uses the platform with others being onboarded.
The company has extended its product range beyond HELOC to mortgage refinancing and student loan refinancing. Based on the Provenance website it looks like it may also venture into supply chain finance. By December last year, it said it had extended more than $700 million in loans.
