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Gilles Gade

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Founder, chairman, president and CEO of Cross River Bank, which per SBA loan-level data originated 478,866 PPP loans worth $12.89 billion. The bank entered an FDIC consent order on fair-lending compliance in March 2023, neither admitting nor denying the findings; the order makes no PPP-fraud determination.

Identity and role

Gilles Gade is the founder, chairman, president and chief executive of Cross River Bank, a state-chartered, FDIC-insured New Jersey bank he started in 2008 and still runs. The bank's corporate home is Fort Lee, New Jersey; its insured charter is held out of Teaneck. Cross River operates a "banking-as-a-service" model in which consumer fintechs originate loans through the bank's charter.

Biography

Gade was born in Paris; an August 2022 profile in the Israeli business daily Globes describes him as "the French-American banker." He initially enrolled in medical studies before switching to business, taking a master's in international management from the MBA Institute (IMIP) in Paris.

By his company's account and corroborating press, he held senior roles at First Meridian Mortgage, Citicorp Venture Capital, Bear Stearns, and Barclays Capital, and co-founded Chela Technology Partners, an investment bank, with his then-manager at Barclays.

He founded Cross River Bank in 2008. Its fintech partners in the 2010s included Affirm, Upstart, Upgrade, Coinbase, Stripe, Rocket, Divvy, Gusto, Veem, and the small-business lenders BlueVine and Kabbage.

The company and its PPP/EIDL role

By the program's end Cross River had made, per SBA loan-level data, 478,866 PPP loans worth $12.89 billion, at an average loan size under $27,000. Banking Dive named it a "Company of the Year" for 2020 on the strength of that reach; an early SBA snapshot already had Cross River third nationally by number of loans approved, with the lowest average loan size among the top fifteen lenders.

PPP paid lenders a processing fee of 5% on the smallest loans, sliding down, and Cross River's book was almost all smallest loans. Applying SBA's fee schedule to its 478,866 loans in SBA's PPP data puts its lender processing fees at about $1.035 billion (about $2,160 per loan). The May 2021 Clyburn letter, citing American Banker, said Cross River's chairman had "admitted to 'diving headfirst into PPP without adding staff.'"

In March 2022 Cross River raised $620 million in a round led by Eldridge and Andreessen Horowitz, with T. Rowe Price, Whale Rock, and Hanaco Ventures participating, reportedly valuing the bank north of $3 billion. Earlier backers had included Battery Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital (a 2016 round) and KKR (a $100 million investment in 2018).

Their own relief

No PPP or EIDL loan to Gade personally, or to Cross River as a borrower, is established in the public record.

Congress (2021). On May 27, 2021, House Select Subcommittee Chairman James Clyburn sent Gade ("Mr. Gilles Gade, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cross River Bank") a document-and-information demand as part of the subcommittee's fintech-PPP-fraud inquiry. The letter cited DOJ cases in which fraudsters had pulled money through Cross River and quoted the "diving headfirst" remark. It was an investigative request, not a charge. Parallel letters went to Kabbage, BlueVine, and Celtic Bank. No charge against Cross River or Gade followed.

The SBA (December 2022). A week after the subcommittee's final report, the SBA suspended Blueacorn and Womply and said it had launched investigations into the high-volume lenders: Cross River, Celtic Bank, Customers Bank, and the nonbanks Fountainhead, Harvest, Capital Plus, Benworth, and Prestamos. No public enforcement action against Cross River resulted.

DOJ borrower-fraud cases. In the PPP criminal cases that name Cross River, the bank is the defrauded institution, not a defendant. In United States v. Dinesh Sah (N.D. Tex.) and United States v. Donald Franklin Trosin (N.D. Iowa), among others, borrowers fabricated companies and employee counts to pull money through Cross River, and restitution runs back toward the bank.

The FDIC (2023). On a stipulation and consent dated March 8, 2023 (publicly released that April), Cross River entered a consent order with the FDIC, Docket FDIC-22-0040b, predicated on a May 3, 2021 consumer-compliance examination. The bank "neither admits nor denies" the order's determinations: unsafe or unsound practices tied to its compliance with fair-lending laws, and violations of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Regulation B) and the Truth in Lending Act (Regulation Z), all aimed at the "Marketplace Lending" program, the fintech-partner channel through which it ran PPP. The order required a board-level fair-lending overhaul, underwriting controls "appropriate to its asset size and transaction volume," FDIC non-objection before launching new credit products or onboarding new fintech partners, and ongoing monitoring. This is a fair-lending and safety-and-soundness matter; the public order makes no PPP-fraud determination. Whether any of the ECOA findings touch PPP approvals specifically is not stated in the public order.

Harborview. Harborview Capital Partners has litigated against Cross River in the District of New Jersey (2:21-cv-15146); the matter is a commercial wire-transfer dispute, not PPP litigation. It includes Harborview's allegation that Cross River failed to follow its own KYC and OFAC policies: an allegation, disputed by Cross River and not adjudicated.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Gade remains founder, chairman, president and CEO of Cross River. Cross River has an Israeli development subsidiary in Jerusalem, the subject of the Globes profile.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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