Prodigy Finance, a global lending platform that provides postgraduate loans to international students, today announces the appointment of Dr. Judith Rodin to the board as Chair.
Dr. Rodin was formerly President of the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.
“I've staked my career on the belief that educational opportunity can transform lives and whole communities, and I've seen first-hand that social purpose finance can be a disruptive force for good.” said Dr. Judith Rodin. “We are living in a moment that offers unprecedented potential to merge these two core elements to achieve outsized results. The Rockefeller Foundation helped launch the field of impact investing, which I believe is the perfect way to describe Prodigy Finance's purpose of removing funding barriers to education for high potential people around the world, thus enabling them to achieve their dreams and goals. This made joining the board and working with the talented management team an easy decision and an exciting opportunity.”
Dr. Rodin is uniquely positioned for the role. From 2005 until 2017, she was the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and from 1994 to 2004, Dr. Rodin served as the 7th president of the University of Pennsylvania – the first female president of an Ivy League university. Prior to that, Dr. Rodin held various professorial and other positions at Yale, including Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Provost.
“Dr. Rodin’s illustrious career and understanding of both the higher education and impact investment worlds will be instrumental for Prodigy Finance as we continue to build our relationships with universities, improving and growing our offering for the best and brightest students from around the world,” said Cameron Stevens, Founder and CEO of Prodigy Finance. “Dr. Rodin has broken through numerous glass ceilings in education and social finance, and we look forward to her entrepreneurial drive steering us as we scale our business further.”
Dr. Rodin will join Tim Bunting, Partner at Balderton Capital; Edward Wray, Co-founder of Betfair; Alan Morgan, Co-Founder of MMC Ventures, Neil Rimer, Co-founder of Index Ventures, and Andy Phillipps, Co-founder of Activehotels