Jaidev Janardana is chief executive of Zopa, the London, England, digital bank. An engineer from India who spent twelve years learning data-driven lending at Capital One, he joined Zopa in October 2014 and later shut down the peer-to-peer business that made it famous to turn it into a bank.
An Engineer in Banking
He grew up in Kochi, India, studied electronics at Gujarat University and worked in telecoms on network planning before an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. In 2002 he joined Capital One in the US, working on data-based marketing and product design at a lender he calls one of the first to use data to personalise offers.
Credit Risk Through the Crisis
In late 2007 he moved to Capital One's UK business to manage credit risk, just before the financial crisis, and later became chief credit officer and then chief marketing officer. His technical background helped with the statistical modelling.
Instant Loans at Zopa
He joined Zopa as chief operating officer in 2014 and became chief executive a year later. Zopa had pioneered peer-to-peer lending in 2005, but he had never worked on loans. His first question was when borrowers learned whether they were approved and at what price. The answer, three or four days, was not good enough. Zopa then approved 20% of applications instantly. New machine learning credit models, in use from 2015, lifted that to 60%, and by about 2020, 99% were decided in under five seconds.
Saying Goodbye to Peer-to-Peer
In November 2016 he told the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority that Zopa wanted to become a bank. Zopa Bank launched in June 2020, and the peer-to-peer business closed in 2021. "Zopa was the world's first peer-to-peer lending company. We were very emotionally attached," he said. In 2025 Zopa made its third full year of profit, with deposits of about $8.6B.
He sees no reason Zopa cannot be as big as Barclays or HSBC. "Models are just rear-view mirrors," he has said. "You can't drive a car only looking in the rear-view mirror." He built Zopa's lending on those models and gave up the business that made the company famous, betting that the road ahead looked different.
