Rajeev V. Date is an American businessman, attorney, and venture capital investor who served as Deputy Director and Special Advisor for the
United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. CFPB's jurisdiction includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortg ...
. He had previously served in a variety of leadership positions at the Bureau, including several months as the startup agency's leader, as the Special Advisor to the
United States Secretary of the Treasury
The United States secretary of the treasury is the head of the United States Department of the Treasury, and is the chief financial officer of the federal government of the United States. The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal a ...
. He is credited with guiding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's early strategic, operational, and policy initiatives.
Early life and education
Date graduated from the
UC Berkeley College of Engineering
The University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering, branded as Berkeley Engineering, is the engineering wing of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California.
Established in 1931, the ...
in 1992, with Highest Honors as the Department Citation recipient for Industrial Engineering and Operations Research; he also earned a
Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from
Harvard Law School in 1995.
Career
Private sector
Prior to joining the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. CFPB's jurisdiction includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mo ...
, he worked as a senior vice president at
Capital One
Capital One Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, headquartered in McLean, Virginia with operations primarily in the United States. It is on the li ...
and as a managing director at
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...
. He had begun his business career at the global consultancy McKinsey & Company, where he worked in the Financial Institutions Group.
Date then felt an interest in getting involved in public policy: “The only things I really knew anything about -- bank balance sheets, consumer credit, capital markets -- all of that was relevant from a public policy point of view in the spring of 2009” he said in an interview with Finance-Re-Wired.
He left the banking industry in 2009 to start the Cambridge Winter Center, a nonprofit
think tank
A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...
devoted to promoting the regulation of financial firms.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
Date joined the CFPB in February 2011 as associate director of research, markets and regulations, where he oversaw work on consumer finance sectors including credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, checking and savings accounts, payday lending, and credit reporting. Date expected putting together the CFPB to be a 2-3 month endeavor, but was asked by Warren and Treasury to lead “the guts of the policy apparatus.”
He succeeded
Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Ann Warren ( née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and former law professor who is the senior United States senator from Massachusetts, serving since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party and regarded as a ...
as special advisor when she stepped down on August 1, 2011 to run for Senate.
His appointment came with controversy, as it was reported that prior to joining, Date had an active role in the talks over the
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly referred to as Dodd–Frank, is a United States federal law that was enacted on July 21, 2010. The law overhauled financial regulation in the aftermath of the Great Recess ...
while being on the Board of Directors of
Prosper Marketplace
Prosper Marketplace, Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based company in the peer-to-peer lending industry. Prosper Funding LLC, one of its subsidiaries, operates Prosper.com, a website where individuals can either invest in personal loans or r ...
, which sought to make changes to the legislation. Date was never found to be in violation of any laws and he had always recused himself from rule-making regarding peer-to-peer lending. Date resigned from the CFPB in 2012, and was succeeded by
Richard Cordray
Richard Adams Cordray (born May 3, 1959) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the COO of Federal Student Aid in the United States Department of Education. He served as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFP ...
, the first Director of the agency. Date later described early CFPB as a start-up and a post-merger environment. He described the goals of the agency as twofold: “To create tangible value for people who interact with the financial services system -- in other words, to really kind of help markets create value for people. It seems so pedestrian now, but coming out of the heels of the crisis it was sort of novel.”
But also to “build a great institution: something that was going to have a culture and norms and talent, and a reputation for trying to do the right thing, and to try to do it in the right way.”
Post-CFPB career
After leaving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Date founded Fenway Summer, a hybrid advisory and venture investment firm based in
Washington, D.C.
)
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, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
Speaking about his hybrid venture capital and advisory firm, Date told American Banker, “At the time that I left Treasury and CFPB in 2013, the observation was ‘golly! There’s a lot going on in fintech right now!’”
A subsidiary of Fenway Summer is FS Vector, a spinoff firm that advises fintechs on the regulatory process: “Our public policy services assist clients with government relations strategies and educating policymakers.”
Date is the co-founder and senior advisor of FS Vector. The advocacy component of FS Vector employs former lobbyists, and offers services in “Messaging and public affairs,” “Reputation and crisis management,” “Crafting policy goals and execution,” and “Political and regulatory intelligence.”. Fenway Summer's investment affiliates include Fenway Summer Ventures and Crossbeam Venture Partners, both of them early-stage institutional venture capital firms.
Date serves on a number of boards of directors, including those of the metaverse pioneer Linden Labs, the student lender College Ave, the cryptocurrency firm
Circle
A circle is a shape consisting of all points in a plane that are at a given distance from a given point, the centre. Equivalently, it is the curve traced out by a point that moves in a plane so that its distance from a given point is con ...
, and the bank holding company
Green Dot Corporation
The Green Dot Corporation is an American financial technology and bank holding company headquartered in Austin. It is the world's largest prepaid debit card company by market capitalization. Green Dot is also a payments platform company and i ...
. Date also chairs the investment committee at Fenway Summer Ventures, serves as a partner with Crossbeam Venture Partners, and counsels clients through the advisory firm FS Vector.
Date has appeared as a contributor on
MSNBC
MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and politi ...
and
CNBC
CNBC (formerly Consumer News and Business Channel) is an American basic cable business news channel. It provides business news programming on weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Eastern Time, while broadcasting talk sho ...
.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Date, Raj
1971 births
Living people
Obama administration personnel
UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni
Harvard Law School alumni
American directors
People of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Place of birth missing (living people)
American politicians of Indian descent