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摘要

Orchard platform, a financial technology company founded in 2013, occupies a small office in Manhattan between two art studios. It is Orchard's third home and soon its 25 employees will relocate a few blocks away to a space that can hold 78 people. It thinks it will have to move again within a year. Orchard is just one of many "fintech" firms sprouting in Wall Street's shadow. But it stands out due to the prominence of its seed investors, including former chief executives of Citigroup (Vikram Pandit) and Morgan Stanley (John Mack). In their former jobs, they struggled to adapt vast, complex institutions to new regulations and fast-changing markets. Orchard, in contrast, is one of the agents of change. It serves as a conduit between large entities that have money to invest and an emerging world of firms that originate loans.