On a recent Podcast, I was joined by Mark Elliot, Chief Customer Officer at Happen Bank, formerly known as LendingClub. He has a simple test for CMOs convinced their brand name is what’s broken.
We discussed GEICO, the Government Employees Insurance Company. The name is, objectively, terrible. It sounds like a credit union for postal workers in 1974. And yet it’s one of the most valuable insurance brands in the world.
Mark’s point is that a rebrand reflects transformation that’s already underway, but doesn’t create the transformation itself.
“Rebrands aren’t trying to force or manufacture transformation. They’re trying to reflect the transformation that is underway. The brand can lead the company, but only if it’s in the direction it’s already going.”
Listen to the full conversation with Mark Elliot here.
Setting the Scene:
LendingClub was founded in 2006 as a peer-to-peer lending platform, IPO’d in 2014, acquired Radius Bank in 2021 to become a chartered digital bank, and rebranded to Happen Bank in June 2026.
Mark joined the company three years ago. In his first conversation with CEO Scott Sanborn, he asked about the name. Scott had been pushing for a rebrand for the better part of a decade.
The name “LendingClub” described a business model the company no longer ran. They’d gone from a peer-to-peer marketplace to a multi-product national digital bank.
Mark, tasked to lead the rebrand, came in with mix of brand and performance marketing experience:
Ran the national direct-to-consumer deposit business at Capital One.
Helped manage the transition to digital banking at JPMorgan Chase.
Led a brand evolution as CMO at TIAA.
Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Bakkt.
CMO at BioCatch.
Sponsored by Bulldog Media Group
Reach the Borrowers Others Miss
Bulldog Media Group specializes in connecting consumer lenders with less than perfect borrowers — a massive, underserved market that requires precision targeting to get right. With 25 years of financial services marketing experience, they deliver qualified leads through affiliate marketing, targeted email, and data-driven acquisition strategies built for this exact audience.
If you’re a lender looking to scale, these are your people.
Why Did They Pick Happen Bank?
They started with over 100 names. Then came the tactical reality of branding: what trademarks are available, what domains are available and at what cost. That cut the list down hard.
Then they ran phase one research. Surveys with both existing customers and prospects, asking things like: Is this a bank you would consider doing business with? How does this make you feel? That narrowed it to six finalists.
Respondents saw the final names in print only, with no logos, colors, or visual identity attached. One finding was unambiguous.
Customers wanted the word “bank” in the name.
“They wanted the trust of the bank, but, and this is a really important but, they wanted it to be innovative. They wanted it to be digital. They didn’t want it to be the bank of their parents or their grandparents.”
The word gave them confidence in how their money was held, and provided the feelings of stability and trust alongside it.
Would The New Name Tank Conversion Rates?
A rebrand can really take a hit to conversion rates. You’re swapping out a known brand for an unknown one across every channel where your CAC depends on recognition.
A few things they did to de-risk distribution:
They tested the new color palette under the old LendingClub brand and tested new brand language under the old name. Across all channels tested, they found either very little impact, or when they did, it trended positive.
Several months before the rebrand, they seeded the market. Direct mail, digital marketing, homepage, search, in-app messaging, and customer email with “LendingClub is becoming Happen Bank.”
After the switch, they kept running “Happen Bank, formerly LendingClub” across touch points (and still do today).
Mark specifically called out working with affiliates and marketplaces to understand how the brand is reflected on those sites. You don’t have full control of how your name appears inside a partner’s marketplace, so they ran tests with partners to nail down their placement.
The KPIs they’re tracking illustrate that this is a performance shop running a brand project.
Short-term: daily search volume for the old brand versus the new one, tracked daily.
Medium-term: a quarterly brand health survey, custom-built rather than a generic gen-pop instrument.
Long-term: brand investments translating into business results.
A Surprise Cost: Rewriting Customer-Facing Emails
I asked Mark if there was a cost line-item in the rebrand that came in higher than expected.
I expected to hear about agency or research bills, but Mark said the biggest unexpected cost was rewriting emails.
The inventory of customer-facing email was much larger than they planned for. A rebrand this big touches just about everything. Emails referencing the company name were sitting in servicing systems that hadn’t gotten much attention in recent years.
The saving grace was that AI capabilities improved fast enough during the project to absorb the overage. They used AI tools to rebrand lower-impact assets.
“I think we were a little bit lucky, to be honest with you. The AI capabilities were improving at an exponential pace while our assets we had to rebrand were also going up. Where those lines crossed for us in a way that allowed us to mitigate the budget impact.”
Mark’s one retrospective was wishing they’d spent even more time making the transition for customers who don’t engage monthly, like for borrowers they aspire to engage more deeply. The rebrand is partly about building that relationship, and he’d have invested more in the customer-side experience if he were to do it again.
Is Brand More Art or Science?
I closed the conversation by asking Mark if a great brand is more art or science, and I wasn’t sure what side he’d take.
“We really wanted to make sure our customers and prospects saw themselves in this brand. Now that we’ve done that work, I think the art part starts to pick up a bit more.”
I heard that as “so far this was science, but the art part is about to come into focus.”
You can listen to the full conversation with Mark Elliot here.
Catch you next week,
The Free Toaster Team
Carlos Caro, Founder at NMG, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster
Nick Madrid, Co-Founder of The Free Toaster and Uncovered Media
P.S.: Less than 10 seats left for the Summit. Request your invitation here: events.thefreetoaster.com.