Spruce Finance, a provider of consumer financing for residential solar and home efficiency improvements in the U.S., has hired Darren Thompson as chief financial officer.
Thomson is responsible for Spruce’s capital markets strategy, accounting, control and risk management, and corporate finance activities. He will report to chief executive Nat Kreamer.
“Darren’s long experience at technology-enabled consumer finance companies is a perfect fit for Spruce,” Kreamer said in a statement this week. “His familiarity with the capital markets and expertise managing rapidly scaling organizations will be invaluable as we continue to profitably grow our business.”
Spruce was formed in December in a merger of the direct consumer-finance business of Kilowatt and the solar-installer finance marketplace offered by Clean Power. It backed by Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Edison International, and Duke Energy, AIDA and Claremont Creek Ventures. The combined companies have raised more than $2 billion in capital and serviced about 50,000 homeowners.
Spruce tapped the securitization market for the first time this month, raising $83.78 million.
Thompson brings more than 25 years of financial services industry experience in consumer finance and financial technology to the job. Most recently, he served as chief financial officer and executive vice president of strategy at B2R Finance, a technology-enabled lending platform. Previously, he was the CFO at RevolutionMoney, a fintech and payments company bought by American Express in 2010.
Thompson also served as the senior vice president and head of Fannie Mae’s credit finance business, where he had direct responsibility for the credit performance of the guarantee business (at the time, the largest portfolio of single asset risk in the world at $2 trillion), until 2005.
Prior to Fannie, he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and a principal at Morgan Stanley, where he raised over $30 billion in high yield and loan capital for more than 200 companies.
“I look forward to using my capital markets expertise to support an exciting growth-stage company,” Thompson said in the press statement. “Spruce’s diverse products and businesses, unique channel model and careful underwriting and compliance standards position it to succeed in an expanding and important industry. My focus will be to build on Spruce’s impressive capital platform and help the company continue to diversify its capital relationships and sources of scalable, low-cost financing.”
