One day at a time. That was Sam Magtanong’s mantra when COVID-19 hit, threatening not only the long-dreamed-of expansion of the San Diego microroastery he built with his wife and two friends, but of the business itself.
“My vision was, if I could stay open for the next day, and if I can pay my staff one more day, and if I can serve one more cup of coffee, there’s a blessing there,” he says. “We just looked at it that way, and we kept just trying to stay open another day.”
For many entrepreneurs, accessing the capital they need to build their businesses can be challenging even in flush times. When Sam and Beverly Magtanong and their partners Jelynn Malone and Mike Arquines opened their first Mostra Coffee location in 2018, they struggled with cash flow and turned to Lendio and Finicity for a loan.
To help small businesses get the credit they need to grow and thrive, Lendio harnesses Finicity’s open banking platform, which lets people more easily share their banking data with other banks, lenders and fintech companies. It gives lenders a more holistic view of a person or business’s finances to help them determine their creditworthiness.
“Eliminating financial hurdles and introducing small business owners to capital opportunities they may not know exist can extend the spirit of entrepreneurship to more people,” says Denada Ramnishta, senior vice president of Lender & Partner Strategy at Lendio.
The pandemic hit when Mostra Coffee was getting ready to open a second coffee shop. Lendio helped Mostra Coffee obtain a U.S. Paycheck Protection loan to keep the business running, hire back staff they had laid off at the start of the pandemic, and finish work on their second location. “I went from feeling a sense of desperation to feeling a sense of relief,” Magtanong says.
With the newest round of PPP loans, Lendio has started working with Finicity’s open banking platform to authenticate bank statements to reduce the risk of fraud in the process. Lendio and Finicity will be bringing their joint capabilities to small businesses in the U.K. and other markets in the coming months through a new strategic agreement. To read more about Mostra Coffee and the open banking effect, go to the Mastercard Newsroom.
Finicity co-founder and CEO Steve Smith recently provided an inside look at open banking, Finicity’s evolution, and the importance of financial inclusion. This interview covered:
- How did Finicity start?
- What challenges did Finicity face in evolving from a single app to a full open banking platform?
- What can you do with an open banking platform?
- What is the potential for open banking?
- What sort of responsibility do you feel you have to support people who may be struggling financially?
To find out the answers to these questions, check out the full interview.
In today’s digital age, consumers have come to expect simple experiences that are convenient, easy to use and quick. These expectations are exerting more pressure on the mortgage lending process.
This webinar covers the impact consumer-permissioned data is having on mortgage lending and how digital verifications can enhance both the borrower and lender experience during origination.
Digitization in mortgage lending is here. Customer expectations are growing. It’s becoming a revolution. Learn how to be on the winning side.
Participants in this webinar include:
Lisa Kimball, Finicity VP of Strategic Partnerships
Don Ashdon, Freddie Mac VP Loan Advisor Strategy and Solutions
Kevin Kauffman, Freddie Mac Senior Director LAS Strategy and Integration
This HousingWire webinar was originally produced on Feb. 20, 2019.
Finicity was named one of the Best Fintechs to Work For in 2021 by Arizent, publisher of American Banker and National Mortgage News. Finicity is one of nine companies that have been included on every year of the list’s existence dating back to 2018.
Even though many fintechs saw growth accelerate over the last 12 months, they were not immune to the political, social and financial turmoil wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies had to respond nimbly, as the crisis demanded shifts in business strategy and leadership style. You can read what leaders learned over the past year as well as view the full list here.
Finicity was also profiled for its timely business strategy and acquisition by Mastercard. You can read it here ($).
You can also explore open positions at Finicity on our Careers page.
When Kristy Kim moved to the U.S. with her family from South Korea, she worked hard to achieve the American Dream. But when she graduated from a top university and landed a high-paying job in investment banking, she realized her years of scrimping and saving didn’t pay off in one crucial way – she had no credit file, so she wasn’t eligible for a car loan. She had to pay cash.
Now Kim has launched TomoCredit Inc., a startup that uses with Finicity’s open banking platform to determine which applicants are qualified for credit, and how much credit to offer them. Traditionally, lenders use a credit score, but many people, including immigrants to the U.S. and young people, have not built up a credit history. TomoCredit’s research indicates that legacy lending policies keep 40 million people from accessing credit and the ability to build wealth.
Using consumer-permissioned real-time data from than 10,000 financial institutions, Finicity can help TomoCredit get a clearer picture of an applicant’s financial health, improving risk assessment and credit decisioning. Once approved, applicants receive a TomoCredit Mastercard credit card with no fees and 0% APR.
“Enabling people to access and control their data, while ensuring best practices to protect both that data and the consumer, will continue to drive tremendous innovation that increases financial literacy, inclusion and health,” Finicity CEO Steve Smith says.
Want to learn more about Kim’s journey, how the TomoCredit Mastercard works, and how TomoCredit. Finicity and Mastercard are enabling inclusive credit? Read more on the Mastercard Newsroom.
The FinTech Breakthrough Awards is the premier awards program founded to recognize the FinTech innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the world. This year, Finicity was recognized as the best Consumer Lending Platform.
Finicity was named to the Women Tech Council (WTC) 2021 Shatter list. The list names the technology and innovation companies that are enacting impactful programs and inclusive cultures to accelerate removing the glass ceiling for women in tech.
Read the full press release.
FinLedger discusses account connectivity, data aggregation and what the future looks like after screen scraping. Ultimately, the success of APIs and open banking comes down to consumer control, access to consumer data, and whether it’s highly secure.
You can read the full article here.
The traditional mortgage process can feel cumbersome to borrowers and loan officers, especially when the digital solutions dominating our lives have us accustomed to fast, convenient, and simple processes. Slow and complex mortgage workflows are more than inconvenient and unfortunately all too common. They require input at every step, back and forth between multiple partners even for some of the simplest tasks. Traditional, manual mortgage processes can also hinder lenders from reaching the full potential of their organizations.
Fortunately, Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) enables lenders to build a simple, streamlined mortgage verification experience with the flexibility to adapt to different mortgage lending use cases and enhance the lending experience for all.
The Drawbacks of Yesterday’s Mortgage Process
Gathering documents, calling employers, and conducting manual verifications add time to the origination process and can be a source of stress for prospective borrowers who have to hunt down paperwork. All that paper shuffling can also increase the chance of fraud and risk for lenders. High-friction lending experiences are frustrating for borrowers who have become accustomed to digital experiences in all aspects of their lives.
And while adopting a digital mortgage solution can simplify this otherwise cumbersome process, adapting digital solutions can be daunting when your organization is accustomed to a particular traditional workflow. Do you have to ditch everything about your current process? Are the returns of a digital mortgage solution worth the time and resources to transform your organization?
Let’s find out.
Finicity MVS: The Simple and Flexible Mortgage Verification Experience
Finicity Lend’s Mortgage Verification Service addresses these problems with traditional mortgage lending and the concerns lenders face when confronted with the thought of changing their workflow. It comes down to two key components that have been core to MVS’s development from the beginning: simplicity and flexibility.
MVS Simplicity
Thanks to Finicity’s open-banking platform, MVS can deliver the financial data necessary for accurate, GSE-accepted, reliable verification of assets, income, and employment. And it gets better: MVS enables lenders to receive the verifications they need with only a single permissioning experience by the consumer, from multiple data sources. Even adding paystub data to bank and payroll data for a more comprehensive picture of income can still only take one permissioning experience that feels right at home in the digital lifestyle of today’s borrowers.
Data-driven verifications cut the risk of manual verifications and toss out the paper chase that came with ‘paper-based’ (from actual paper to digital documents) processes. The all-in-one, one-touch experience further streamlines and simplifies the lending process and improves the overall experience for both borrowers and lenders, potentially cutting up to 12 days off the origination timeframe.
MVS Flexibility
Every lending scenario is as different as the borrowers that come to you. These unique scenarios mean that there can’t be a one-size-fits-all digital mortgage solution. It needs to be flexible. MVS is flexible enough to adapt to unique mortgage lending use cases and workflows and balance the appropriate level of borrower friction, optimizing the overall process.
With MVS, lenders can request only the data they need to validate income, assets, or employment, or they can request all the verifications at once. No need to sort through unnecessary information to assess a borrower’s risk. For example, a refinancing may not require the asset verification necessary with a new home purchase. MVS provides what you need, when you need it, and in the best, most simplified way with clean, easy-to-read reports.
And while MVS’s one-touch experience is ideal, some use cases or customer experiences require more than one permissioning experience with the borrower. Some consumer flows, for example, only require asset data in one step, and then request income data separately. Or, your flow may attempt a complete verification from transactions only, and you may return to the borrower for a second permissioning experience for paystub data later. MVS can as easily adapt to these two-touch scenarios as the one-touch experience, enhancing lender flow rather than replacing it, and allowing lenders to balance friction with borrowers on their own terms.
Regardless of the permissioning experiences required for accurate and reliable risk assessment, borrowers and lenders will always enjoy a streamlined, fast, secure permissioning process through Finicity Connect for less friction and more time saved. Thanks to this flexibility, MVS helps lenders balance what you believe is the best experience for the borrowers with the tools you need to get the highest possible verification success rate.
With Finicity’s MVS, you can enjoy the benefits of a streamlined, simplified, and flexible digital mortgage experience without sacrificing what makes your lending process unique to your organization. And to top it all off, you get the most accurate data, courtesy of open banking and consumer permissioning. Enhance your lending with Finicity Lend’s MVS.
Bloomberg Law discusses the expectations that the CFPB should create regulations for consumers’ safe sharing of their bank data with finance apps.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has to decide how to apply dated consumer finance laws—aimed at protecting consumers from data breaches, flawed credit reports, and fraudulent transactions—to the new world of open banking.
Read the full analysis ($) here.