Fintech funding round-up: 18 May 2018
All killer. No filler. This fintech funding round-up features LendingPoint, Open and The Disruption House.
US consumer credit provider LendingPoint has closed up to $600 million in committed credit facility arranged by Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets division of Guggenheim Partners. With this new deal, LendingPoint says it has secured up to $1.1 billion of senior credit financing in less than one year.
The firm explains that it uses dozens of APIs to gather thousands of data points on each applicant. It has developed proprietary risk models that allow the company to get a financial picture of the customer and approve more people who otherwise may have been overlooked. It has processed more than 850,000 applications arising from borrowers requesting more than $9.2 billion in loans during the first quarter of 2018.
Over in India, neo-banking start-up Open is not that open as it reveals no figures in its pre-series A funding from Unicorn India Ventures, Recruit Strategic Partners and ISME-ACE. The funding will be used to enhance its core platform to launch new products in the lending and wealth management sectors.
Open offers a digital current account in partnership with banks to provide “features of a traditional bank account with integrated tools to automate finances for small businesses”. SMEs can send and receive payments combined with an artificial intelligence (AI) based accounting engine, that in turn automates bookkeeping and expense management. Its platform also offers APIs for developers to integrate banking and payments into their business workflows. The start-up says it has about 1,000 customers and is also getting ready to launch a business expense card with an attached credit-line. Open has currently partnered with seven banks.
Last and in London. The Disruption House (TDH), a benchmarking and data analytics firm, has closed a “significant” funding round and the creation of its executive advisory board. The undisclosed amount of funding was raised from a small group of private investors and will enable the firm to complete production of its benchmarking and performance tracking platform.
Rupert Bull, co-founder and CEO at TDH, says it wants to enable “accelerated collaboration between financial institutions and the new specialist technology solutions providers”. He adds that its TDH scorecard service has already generated new business and funding opportunities for a number of unnamed vendors it is working with.
