Friday,29 March 2024

Lendio’s Blake: “We want the awareness of Lendio to continue to expand”

5 min read

Interviewed By The Asian Banker Live

Brock Blake, co-founder and chief executive officer of Lendio, discusses the nature of the company, the products it offers, as well its future plans.

Brock Blake: So, this is an interesting time in the market right now. I’d like to say a couple of years ago it was all high fives with the rainbows and unicorns. Everyone was a little bit over inches around of what was happening. And then last year it was really subdued because of some of the things that happened with Lending Club and Prosper. Now, what we’re seeing is that the industry is really maturing. And we are starting to identify who are will be the winners and who are those not who are not gonna make it. We’ve had quite a few players in this space, both lenders and other platforms that have gone out of business. And it didn’t have a sustainable business model that could raise money. And I think it’s an important time in the industry where we are identifying who really has solid unit in economics, who knows how to acquire costumers, and who can built for a long term. So, you know, I think it’s exciting because the industry is maturing in my opinion.

So, we are a small business loan marketplace. So, it’s kind a like the Kayak for business loans. We don’t lend ourselves. We focus on small business, mainstream businesses, restaurant owners, landscapers, dry cleaners and they come to us because we allow them to compare and shop multiple offers on our platform. So, we have built in integrations with a lot of the large lenders like Bank of America, American Express, Lending Club, OnDeck Capital, Cabbage. So, business owners can get multiple offers and they can compare and shop the rate, the term, and payment amount and decide “this is the best fit for me, I’m gonna choose that loan.” We’re growing very quickly, growing bout 100% year-on-year. And we are really focused on providing the business owner in a great costumer experience.

Yes. So, we pull credit. We go on pull and analyse six months of bank transaction data. We pull, Googled local data and we compile all these data in one application and then our technology identifies, based on all these data and all the data we have on our lenders, which loan options are the best fit. We’ll submit that application to those lenders. They’ll underwrite it and then send back to us an offer or a decline. And then we’ll present the offer to the business owners, “okay here are your options”.

So credit, term loans, working capital loans, equipment loans, commercial real estate loans, cash advance loans. Almost every option available for the business owner.

Yeah so, you know, these loans, I think, it’s a healthy time, businesses are very healthy and they’re growing. The economy is strong and all the data that we have is showing that, it will continue to stay strong. We are not seeing signs of deterioration. And the lenders you know, especially think about these lenders, Cabbage and OnDeck capital, American Express, they’ve been around long enough. They know how to underwrite. They’ve have a lot of volume going through their platforms. The performance of our loans is very, very high.

We’re primarily focused on the US right now. And we will eventually look to expand in other markets but...

We’ve look in other you know, like for example, going in the consumer lending or other things like that. So, you know, we’re trying to decide right now, are were gonna expand geographically, or we will expand on a product base? We also have a lot of business owners and we have a lot of data and how can we leverage that to offer great products and services. We have some things in the works.

Well, you know, right now, we’re on growth mode. So we’re trying to continue growing the volume. We want the awareness of Lendio to continue to expand. We’ve done some partnerships, we’ve partnered with Comcast small business. We’ve partnered with Staples. We have a couple other partners that we have lent that we haven’t announce yet. So, we are definitely in growth mode. We’re also looking to say, how can we innovate or release new products for the costumers that we are reserved. And we’ve got a couple of things that in the works that we’re just not quite ready to announce yet.

 So you take the economics and valuations of a traditional lender and they’ve been applied to the Lending Clubs and OnDeck and so on. We are not lender. We’re a market place. We’re more, you know, like a Kayak or a Yelp or a Zillow or Lending Tree, where we’re not the ones actually underwriting alone.


Keywords: Loan Marketplace
Institutions: Lendio
Country: USA
Region: North America
People : Brock Blake
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