Corporate Counsel of the Year – Growing Private Company Honoree
LA Business Journal
LANA SHNEYDINA
Corporate Counsel
Sunbit
Lana Shneydina exemplifies the personal and professional qualities of grit, passion, commitment and integrity. She moved from Ukraine to the US in 2004, having to learn and adapt to a brand new, complicated legal system while considering her professional path forward. Ultimately she dedicated herself to the areas of consumer protection and consumer finance, having always wanted to support everyday global citizens however she could, due in part to her human rights and global development background.
That mindset guided Shneydina to a goal of helping companies build fair, transparent and compliant products and platforms, for win-wins in which consumers and companies alike can benefit. More specifically, she wanted to help bring to life a consumer-facing organization with a culture of compliance at its core, to drive ethical, people-focused products and decision-making.
Shneydina found the perfect opportunity to achieve those goals in Sunbit, at the time an early-stage startup seeking to offer point-of-sale financing services to consumers with unprecedented fairness and transparency. She knew she could contribute to Sunbit’s offerings and culture from the start, and accepted the company’s offer to join in 2016.
Shneydina got to work educating the business on compliance and consumer-friendly practices as related to product features, consumer screening, internal processes/procedures and policies. Quickly, she built a strong legal and compliance function in the organization, leading a team of four lawyers and 11 compliance personnel. Her efforts contributed to Sunbit achieving a $1.1 billion valuation in 2021. More importantly, she has helped foster a firm-wide consumer and compliance-centric culture that informs all Sunbit decisions and priorities.
