Lending Club, Wealthfront and Intuit team for consumer data
What do you get when you combine Intuit, Lending Club and Wealthfront?
What do you get when you combine Intuit, Lending Club and Wealthfront? We’re about to find out, thanks to Intuit’s announcement that it is making user data available to third-party providers, writes Julie Muhn at Finovate.
California-based Intuit partnered with peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company Lending Club and robo-advisor Wealthfront, fueled by Intuit-owned Turbox, leveraging the more than 80,000 data fields on the TurboTax return, including income, employment, housing etc. With one click, TurboTax users can save time during Lending Club’s loan application process by importing their data. Similarly, shared TurboTax and Wealthfront clients can open an account much faster and receive more personalised financial advice based on their tax return data.
Lending Club notes the capability will do more than just speed up the application process. Cole Gillespie, VP and head of business development at Lending Club, believes the TurboTax data will “unlock the access to credit for customers that ordinarily we might not be able to serve; this partnership is a step in leveraging alternative data sources to help us increase the speed and access to credit”.
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront describes partnering with a company like Intuit as “a dream come true”. He explains: “They don’t just pay lip service to caring about the client. They constantly challenge themselves to provide more value. Integrating with TurboTax data that customers agree to provide will allow Wealthfront to continue to raise the bar on what it means to deliver accessible, convenient, and deeply personalised financial planning. We can’t wait to do more together.”
Intuit is also leveraging the data to pre-fill applications within PFM platform, Mint; financial recommendations site, Turbo; and existing external Intuit partners. By combining household data to give lenders a view of shared household income, credit score, and debt, Intuit offers a fuller picture of total borrowing and savings power. The company estimates pre-qualification leveraging TurboTax data generates a conversion rate of up to 9x in offer performance.
“With more than 25 million users and rich insights into their financial profile, Mint and Turbo are uniquely positioned to deliver value to both consumers and strategic partners,” says Varun Krishna, VP of product management for Intuit’s consumer division. “Using machine learning, we are able to provide consumers a comprehensive view of their finances and highlight relevant opportunities to save time and money and generate unique value to our partners.”
Best known for its Quickbooks accounting software, Intuit has 20 locations across nine countries and employs 9,000 people. Founded in 1983, Intuit went public ten years later and today has a market capitalisation of $54.6 billion.
Founded in 2006, Lending Club recently appointed Ronnie Momen as chief lending officer. Lending Club went public in 2015 and today the company’s market capitalization is $1.54 billion.
Wealthfront (formerly known as KaChing) began 2018 by landing $75 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $205 million. A few weeks later, the company launched a home ownership planning tool.
