What does it take to leave a prestigious law career, join the most hated government program in history, and then launch a fintech startup with no clients, no marketing materials, and no industry relationships? Ian Lampl did exactly that. Host Mark Ritter welcomes Ian, founder and CEO of LoanStreet, to discuss the evolution of loan servicing, commercial lending, and the broader fintech landscape. Ian shares his journey from Wall Street attorney to TARP deputy counsel to entrepreneur, offering candid insight into what it takes to build a company from scratch in the credit union space. The conversation covers how credit union balance sheet management tools have matured and where the biggest gaps remain.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

✅ How loan participation has grown from a niche liquidity tool into a sophisticated balance sheet management strategy that more credit unions are using as a primary resource rather than a last resort.

✅ Why credit unions tend to overestimate charge-off risk while underestimate prepayment risk, and how a stronger focus on total return could meaningfully improve lending program performance.

✅ What sets modern loan servicing platforms apart from legacy systems, and why the complexity of commercial lending infrastructure makes it one of the hardest and most underserved areas in fintech.

✅ How LoanStreet is expanding into private credit, Canadian credit unions, and European markets while deepening its consumer analytics capabilities through a partnership with Experian.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Mark opens with a look at 2026 lending trends and introduces loan participation expert Ian Lampl

01:44 Ian reflects on his time at TARP, government oversight challenges, and lessons from the 2008 financial crisis

06:18 From law firm to entrepreneur: Ian discusses the risk of leaving a stable career to build a fintech startup, and shares advice regarding starting your own business

12:06 How the loan participation marketplace has grown in sophistication, scale, and frequency across the credit union industry

15:15 Ian explains why credit unions underweight prepayment risk and how focusing on total return improves outcomes

22:28 Inside LoanStreet's commercial loan servicing platform and why modern solutions in this space remain rare

28:31 Ian discusses the upcoming growth expected for LoanStreet

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

💎 Loan participation has evolved from a last-resort liquidity move into one of the most powerful balance sheet management tools available to credit unions, with more institutions now using it earlier and at greater scale.

💎 Credit unions consistently overweight charge-off risk while underweighting prepayment risk, and shifting toward a total return mindset could unlock stronger performance across programs like indirect auto and residential lending.

💎 Modern loan servicing platforms for commercial lending are rare because building them requires deep industry knowledge, years of development, and significant fintech investment. LoanStreet is one of the few companies actively closing that gap, with a large R&D budget and updates released every two weeks.

ABOUT THE GUEST:

Ian Lampl is the co-founder and CEO of LoanStreet Inc., an innovative online platform that helps financial institutions to manage, scale and analyze loans on their balance sheets, connect with partners and effectively share risk.

Prior to launching LoanStreet, Ian served as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Office of Financial Stability which implemented the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for the United States Department of the Treasury. While at Treasury, Ian developed and managed a number of the Treasury programs to stem the financial crisis. For his work, he received the Treasury Secretary's honor award for exemplary public service.

Ian is recognized as an industry leader in loan participations and is a frequent speaker at banking, credit union, and financial technology conferences. Before joining Treasury, Ian was an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where he focused on commercial lending and securities offerings. He graduated with honors from both University of Chicago Law School and Princeton University, where he received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering.

LoanStreet - Website

Ian Lampl - Email

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Mark Ritter - Website

Mark Ritter - LinkedIn

SEO KEYWORDS:

Credit Union Conversations, Mark Ritter, MBFS, Credit Unions, CUSO, Loan Participation, Loan Servicing, Balance Sheet Management, Commercial Lending, Fintech, Loan Origination, Private Credit, Prepayment Risk, Charge-off Risk, Loan Portfolio, Balance Sheets, Transforming Loan Portfolios

[00:00:29] Weren't sure, you know, the interest rate environment, who knows what. And I haven't seen all the numbers yet because they're not quite published, but I can tell you without looking at them that the numbers are gonna be pretty good. We're pretty stable. Everybody I talk to is pretty stable. People are happy with life.

[00:01:11] Speaking of the loan world and the loan servicing world, I'm very excited for a longtime friend of mine. Joining me today is Ian Lample of LoanStreet. Ian, thank you for joining me.

[00:01:26] Mark Ritter: It is gonna be a fun time having the audience get to know you and LoanStreet and the evolution of LoanStreet.

[00:01:44] Ian Lampel: Well, again, thank you, Mark, for having me, and great to meet everyone on the podcast. So I will try to be short versus the whole origin story, but we started LoanStreet about twenty thirteen.

[00:02:15] Before TARP, I was an attorney at a law firm in New York called Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where I was focused mostly on commercial lending and securities offerings. So spent the bulk of my career in kind of capital markets-oriented transactions or commercial lending transactions.

[00:02:32] A- and when you look back at the TARP days, is there anything that jumps out at you of, wow, those were some crazy times. We'll never... I don't know if we'll ever see that again, or I hope we never see that again. What's kind of the, the top memory or two from the TARP days?

[00:02:59] It was seeing [00:03:00] how the government worked, how journalism worked, how oversight bodies worked. Some of it was really positive experiences where you saw the best of these things, and some of them can be quite sad and frustrating and disappointing. I would say probably the most disappointing experience that I had at TARP was I became very disillusioned with the idea of oversight bodies.

[00:03:42] SIGTARP alone had, like, a bigger budget than we did And so you have four times the number of people, right? Basically looking at what you're doing versus the doers. You know, if you can imagine if you're building a home and one person's hammering the nail and you have four people telling them they're doing it wrong, [00:04:00] it can become a, kind of a frustrating experience.

[00:04:24] So that was probably the most fascinating thing I learned, which I had no insight to before I, I joined the government.

[00:04:46] Like we're all making the... We all have the exact same experience and doing this for... If w- if everybody has been doing this 30 days, nobody has any more experience, and the oversight and the doers and people, we're all just kind of [00:05:00] running along here doing the same thing.

[00:05:05] I would say when I look back, right? Like PPP was actually, if you look at the number of dollars, so much larger than TARP, but I still think TARP was probably the most hated government program in history. Even when I went down, I mean, there were protests. I mean, people were so angry about TARP, and I will say I have kind of two thoughts on that.

[00:05:42] On the other side of the coin, I take to, try to take pride in how we operationalized it, right? I think people have worked really hard to make sure that the taxpayer dollars were well spent, that we earned a return on those dollars, and I think people really do not understand how successful TARP was in terms [00:06:00] of avoiding a massive depression and actually making money while doing it.

[00:06:18] Mark Ritter: That's good. So you obviously had much higher SAT scores than me. That, that's not, not a problem, and, and what fascinates me with your background, a- and I've met-- seen this s- several times, you know, you went to university, you took the LSATs, you got into-- went to law school.

[00:07:15] What is that like?

[00:07:35] Like-

[00:07:40] Ian Lampel: Right. My, my family was not happy with that decision. Most of my friends thought I was crazy, and then I compound that, right? When I leave TARP, I don't take that special experience and go back to a law firm.

[00:08:16] They genuinely wanted me to have a good life, a successful career, less stress. I suspect that maybe a combination of two things. One, I can be an incredibly naive person sometimes, and I think being naive actually helps you because if realize how hard it would be to do these things, you would, you would n- never do it.

[00:08:38] Mark Ritter: It helped, it helped shield you from reality

[00:08:57] And so, like when I left Harp to [00:09:00] start Lone Street, I mean, I had zero relationships in the credit union space. I think when you ma- like none, right? Like it's not like I had like a long history, knew people. I just would go to conferences and I, I had never even been to a conference before. I mean, the first time I went to a conference, I didn't even have like, you know, the marketing materials, the flags, the bo- And, you know, my wife comes with me, she was my salesperson, and she was like, "Ian, wh- wh- where's the marketing materials?

[00:09:37] I mean, we really had no idea what we were doing. And, you know, you would just start looking at the other guy and, "Well, what's that guy doing? Okay, he's got business cards, he's got a booth, he's got candy." It's like we were literally had no clue what we were doing. And I think had I known how hard this was going to be to start a company, I...

[00:10:09] Mark Ritter: A- a- and I remember when we first met, and it was at a credit union conference in Hershey. That was the first time we met in person back when I was at Members 1st. A- a- and that was whe- when Lone Street was more of an idea than, than a f- the powerhouse that it is today. You know, i- if you were looking back, you know, kind of those early days, what's the lesson learned or that hump you had to get over if you were talking to a group of 20-somethings today about, "I want to start my own business"?

[00:11:08] We were frequently the first solution everyone, anyone ever got on AWS, right? Or, you know, they... People would tell me they had a fintech partner, it was Fiserv, right? Like, the concept of fintech did not exist really when we, we started. So we were super early. And so I think it's dramatically better today.

[00:11:35] Mark Ritter: certainly are more resources today.

[00:11:47] That was something we did not have when we started, and it, it hurt us. It hurt us, and it took us much longer, I think, to get to kind of our first few clients than it needed to. I think that was a [00:12:00] big misstep on our part. And, but, you know, we survived, but it was not easy in the early years

[00:12:13] Um, you know, all, all sorts of different asset classes, including commercial lending and a whole bunch of other things. And I always say, you know, sometimes I feel like there are certain times in the marketplace where we've had more loan participation marketplaces than loans for sale. And, and today you- we'll talk a little bit more.

[00:12:41] Ian Lampel: So, and I, I think you would agree with this, it's a much bigger market today than it was when we started. Oh, absolutely. And I think it is bigger across every dimension.

[00:13:22] You know, instead you could sell loans, turn around and get that capital, and redeploy it. And so I do think managing your balance sheet through participation is, is just really unique in terms of the tools credit unions have. It shouldn't be the only tool in their toolkit, but it's an important one. And I think that importance, once you see a few credit unions doing it and you realize it's possible, the industry has just completely changed in terms of how they think about it, and now I see a lot of credit unions use it.

[00:14:09] The knowledge that participants have about how to think about participations has accrued dramatically, and I think the expectations that they have of us, right, has grown dramatically, and that's a good thing.

[00:14:31] This was the first time, and the sophistication level has just skyrocketed. You know, it was, "Oh, we need money," or, "We need liquidity. Well, let's put out a CD in the Sunday paper." A- and, or, or, "We wanna diversify our loan portfolio. Let's do more loans in the same town and have a special." You know, the, it-- where just the conversations have changed dramatically.

[00:14:57] Mark Ritter: So you w- one of the [00:15:00] pieces with LoanStreet is you're obviously very embedded into the credit union space, but also other countries, other banks, other non-bank lenders. So y- so you see a lot of different touch points.

[00:15:15] Mark Ritter: It... You, you're a credit union consultant for a day. What, what do you say the credit unions as a whole do well as an industry versus what are things that we need to work on in totality?

[00:15:42] Mark Ritter: We

[00:15:53] That said, I think, I think the, the differences between banks and credit unions are pretty de minimis. Where I [00:16:00] see bigger differences will be between, say, credit unions and asset managers. And one of the things I would say on the... I'll start with the negative, I guess, right? Which would be, at least from my perspective, would be that I think asset managers really are very disciplined in looking at total return for what they're doing in lending, and they typically look at risk, whatever those risks may be, to the total return on the opportunity.

[00:16:52] I-- In my conversations with credit unions, I think they overweight charge-off risk and underweight [00:17:00] prepayment risk. And there's lots of reasons why that happens, from boards to regulations to CECL, right? I'm not suggesting that they are irrational in this behavior at all. But if I could, you know, wave a magic wand, I think I would encourage credit unions to take maybe a little bit more emphasis on prepayment variability and the risk that that entails.

[00:17:42] So if we look over the last fifteen years, the variability that we have seen in prepayment speeds is huge. Huge. Where I think if you were to look at the variability for prime auto or say non-conforming high, you know, high FICO, high, you know, high LTV mortgages, right? I think the [00:18:00] variability in charge off there has been modest, where the variability in prepayment speed has, has been significant.

[00:18:26] And so frequently, whether a credit union's indirect auto program or residential program is successful can oftentimes be driven by how much it costs to get that loan on the balance sheet, much more so than anything else. And so- That's where I feel if, if we could encourage credit unions to take prepayment risk a little bit more, look at it more aggressively, and how it's impacting their balance sheet, I, I think that would be a, a benefit to the whole industry.

[00:19:09] Mark Ritter: Yeah. I don't think anybody's ever gotten fired for misjudging prepayment speeds, but many people have gotten fired for misjudging credit risk, and that's pro- like, that's probably much more in their face more than anything else.

[00:19:29] I, I've seen a lot... I've had conversations with credit unions where, and again, I, I wanna be cautious here, this is not all credit unions. But I've had conversations where they will have a program where the re- they have n- had no losses on their, like, HELOC program, but when you run the analysis on total return, it's been below Treasuries.

[00:20:05] Mark Ritter: You just haven't made any money.

[00:20:08] Ian Lampel: And so again, that- that's why I feel like paying attention to paying a tremendous amount of money for how you originate a loan. And by the way, also paying attention to origination cost even helps on the charge-off risk, right? If you're paying 103 for an auto loan and the loan charges off, that's a lot more painful than paying par, right?

[00:20:49] And to me, that is a huge boon to the industry, right? Like I think there are opportunities for credit unions to be aggressive, to go after bigger and different types of lending [00:21:00] opportunities, go upmarket, spread risk around, and I see that as not just something that they're good at, but that they can continue to lean into to succeed.

[00:21:13] Mark Ritter: I want to talk a little bit about what LoanStreet is up to today because many people may not realize the company is as diverse as it is in today's world, particularly with loan servicing platforms. And there is nothing that frustrates me and my brethren more than our options out there.

[00:22:11] L- servicing platforms, you can't find any. So tell people a little bit about your loan servicing initiatives a- and why you're, you're not seeing this massive competition like you do in some other segments.

[00:22:36] We are less well-known for the fact that we have an entire servicing platform for corporate and commercial loans. We really started on that journey after PPP. So as you may recall, in PPP, we provided credit unions with a solution to help them do PPP lending, and through that, we also had to give them the ability to service those loans.

[00:23:19] Now people talk about it constantly, but even five years ago, it was big and getting bigger. And when we would talk to people we knew in that space, and this may surprise your listeners, but most of them were servicing these massive loans on Excel spreadsheets.

[00:23:33] Ian Lampel: And, you know, our view was like, "Well, wait a minute.

[00:23:56] A, a system really focused on doing that. And I think we [00:24:00] think about this problem twofold. One is there's the loan modeling, right? How do you build a system that can fully capture the full complexity of the interest fees, loan tracking, you know, all the obligations, covenants that go into modeling the loan?

[00:24:30] And I'm sure you can a- agree there's a lot of Excel spreadsheets around Yeah ... around commercial lending system. And so I, I think to partly answer your question there is, I think the, what I might call the table stakes of building a meaningfully better commercial servicing platform that both can model the complexity of what you're doing as the loan itself, and then also provide workflows for the business of lending that you do.

[00:25:14] And I'm sure the people who are building LOSs are gonna yell at me now, but my suspicion is that it might take slightly less industry knowledge, maybe take slightly less time to build a reasonably functioning LOS, right? That, you know, that's my suspicion, that there are other parts of the tech stack that credit unions have, member experience, you know, market- whatever the case may be, that might just be slightly smaller technical hurdles.

[00:26:02] Mark Ritter: What, what I, I make no secret about it a-and I have told people in five years we'll all be on LoanStreet servicing platform, and it'll be the industry standard.

[00:26:12] Mark Ritter: very kind of you. Thank you. Um, and, and I won't send you a bill for that. But yeah, I, I have said that be-- A-and part of it is I think it's on its tra-- I think it's a very good service now, and I think it's on its way to, to getting better. But part of it is I think many of the competitors are just stuck in the mud from years and years ago.

[00:26:51] Ian Lampel: No, I think that's right. And, and I don't really think they hide that fact, right?

[00:27:18] And we have a huge R&D budget, right? Like if you were to look at the large players, and without naming anyone specifically, but if you look at the publicly traded financial technology providers in this space, their R&D budgets are like below the rate of inflation. You know, it's, it's pathetic. And, you know, our R&D budget is, I don't know, 50% of our rev-- I, I mean, it's massive, right?

[00:28:02] And I think we're lucky that we're private, right? We-we're, we're not subject to the same kind of public shareholder pressure on cost. So I can spend more of our budget on R&D than maybe my public peers can. But I w- I, I think the R&D difference is massive

[00:28:32] Ian Lampel: So, you know, we are always still working on making our participation solution better and deeper, so that, that's not gonna end. A couple of areas of growth for us have been the commercial servicing solution we just discussed, and what's part of the exciting growth there is not just among US credit unions, but Canadian credit unions, private credit in the US, private credit in Europe.

[00:29:10] Mark Ritter: Yeah.

[00:29:30] So I think in large measure at LoanStreet, you know, we're gonna continue to keep pace with our existing solutions and then really try to deepen our servicing and analytics so that our view is a credit union or a credit union service provider can come to us and we can really provide a tremendous amount of, like, balance sheet management and infrastructure around the lending side, right?

[00:30:10] Mark Ritter: Ian, thank you so much for joining me today. If somebody wants to get in touch with LoanStreet, how, how can they do that?

[00:30:28] We're very easy to get ahold of. But before I- we tap out here, Mark, I just want to say thank you so much for having me. This was great. I always value our conversations.

[00:30:45] Ian Lampel: Fair enough.

[00:30:47] Mark Ritter: Thank you very much. Joining me today was Ian Lampel, the founder and CEO of LoanStreet. So please check them out if you're in the need for loan servicing, participations, or you just wanna [00:31:00] check and see if they're state of the world and if they can help you out. So this is Mark Ritter, your host of Credit Union Conversations.