Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nectarine Credit CEO Alex Armitage (Part 1)

One of the biggest trends in FinTech is digitizing and speeding up the credit application and approval process. Another trend is using proprietary data to bring new financing options to cater to different segments of borrowers. Alex discusses a very interesting niche context within which he’s building a wonderful FinTech company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Nectarine Credit.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan (Part 5)

Jared Kaplan: The power of the model is that it enables the customers to tell the story. We have done a tremendous job in providing access. We know that because we try to give the business away when someone applies. It’s a time and a process. Let’s say they go to Google and they type, “Car broke down. Need cash.”

They fill up the application for five minutes. Before we send that data to the banks, we send the data to 15 prime lenders to see if anyone wants the business upfront. 92% of the time, no one returns an offer.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you integrate with their bank accounts or somehow see their bank statements to verify?

Jared Kaplan: We have a sophisticated bank verification process in most cases where customers send us their bank data. We take all that data and we do a lot of proprietary data analysis. All of those data points boil up into a proprietary underwriting score that the banks ultimately adopt.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a Software-as-a-Service that you sell to banks, or is it a two-sided marketplace that you plug banks into?

Jared Kaplan: We would describe it as a service provided to banks. A bank hires us and asks us to do all the acquisitions. 

Sramana Mitra: So you acquire loan customers on behalf of banks?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan (Part 2)

Jared Kaplan: I was approached for a CEO job at OppFi. Those don’t come along every day, so I took a closer look. It had been started by a well-known family in Chicago called the Schwartz family. Ted Schwartz had built a successful call center business in the 90s called APAC Customer Services.

His son, Todd Schwartz, had founded OppFi and had this terrific vision. After the great recession, a tremendous amount of capital dried up from the middle American market, and customers with poor or near-prime credit scores, all of the sudden, had fewer options to finance their purchases.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: OppFi CEO Jared Kaplan (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Consumer credit is getting destroyed at a furious pace. OppFi helps credit-challenged borrowers access credit and heal their credit scores.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce OppFi and yourself to our audience.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Epic River CEO Jeff Grobaski (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As I am listening to you, what strikes me in the situation is that there isn’t much awareness in consumers that they can do this and such a facility exists in community banks and credit unions. That awareness probably doesn’t exist.

Jeff Grobaski: We are trying to drive that awareness through the healthcare providers because we don’t want them to call people and say, “Cash, check, or credit card?”

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Epic River CEO Jeff Grobaski (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How many community banks are in your customer base?

Jeff Grobaski: We’ve got a little over a thousand community banks now. We are integrated into over 40 bank systems. We are able to speed the time-to-close without increasing the cost. 

Sramana Mitra: How long have you been doing this?