After postponing its IPO last year, Elevate Credit, the venture-backed lending company, went public on the New York Stock Exchange today.
Elevate priced at $6.50 per share, closing the day up over 19% at $7.76, but this was still well below the expected range of $12 to $14. They decided to go through with the offering to take advantage of an open “IPO window,” with a strong investor appetite for newly public tech companies.
“We started this IPO process a year ago in a really terrible market and it’s great to get it done,” said CEO Ken Rees. He was so excited to ring the opening bell that he “broke the gavel.”
It’s been an especially difficult environment for lending startups following LendingClub’s challenges and other industry regulatory concerns. But Rees said that he’s optimistic that any upcoming regulation surrounding payday loans would likely just “get rid of a lot of bad actors” and that Elevate would prevail because their standards are in line with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFTB).
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