These “neo banks” are helping small and medium-sized businesses automate their finances and access many additional features in different parts of the world including the US.

A new fintech startup has emerged in the U.S. which is step by step moving closer to the unicorn status. MoneyLion is headquartered at the New-York City provides its customers with financial advice and access to loans and other services. Its branches are spread at San Fransisco, Salt Lake City, and Kuala Lumpur MoneyLion describes itself as a mobile bank. It operates as part lending, part savings, and part wealth management app. The all-in-one platform of MoneyLion enables users to join all their bank accounts and credit cards. They also allow the users to receive personalized advice on how to better spend their money and secure loans from within the app.

According to a report in TechCrunch, the startup generates most of its revenue from subscription services. These subscription services cost $19.99 per month for the customers as told by Dee Choubey, CEO and founder of MoneyLion. The subscription offers bundles banking, core investment management and access to financing for the customers who buy it.
 

Here is a graph from Similarweb showing the app ranking of MoneyLion in the Google Play store:

Another graph from App Annie to show MoneyLion’s app ranking in the last week. The app ranked 94th in the Finance category.

MoneyLion is basically making money more approachable for its users to help them in having better control over their finances. According to the information available on their website, since the launch in 2013, they have more than $5+ million savings, 200,000 loans originated, and more than 1 million bank accounts linked.

There are more than 5 million customers using the MoneyLion app that includes free users, who are able to access some core banking features at no cost.

The company has recently raised $100 million in a new round to accelerate its growth in the U.S. market. The company has also raised $60 million in venture capital and debt in Q2 2018. The MoneyLion has raised more than $200 million till today. The current round has made the value of the startup up to $1 billion.

MoneyLion will use the newly raised money to refine its subscription offerings, finance model and add new features to keep its existing users attracted to the platform. Last year, the MoneyLion app bandied out over $12 million in cashback rewards to its members. 70% of users of the MoneyLion app also saw their credit score climb up by 30 points.

The company aims to invest heavily in broker-dealer capabilities, training capabilities and stock investing capabilities. They are planning to approach the financial services like Netflix approaching content in order to keep the users hooked to the platform.

Another reason for you to go for fintech app development: Zeta’s success

The startups which are looking to expand the reach of financial services continue to receive a nod from investors. Another example of such fintech firm is Zeta that runs a full-stack neo-banking platform. The company also offers enterprise payment solutions. The company was recently funded by Sodexo BRS. According to a TechCrunch report, the raised amount was less than $60 million. It is the first time for the company to raise money from an outside source.

Zeta currently operates in Asia and Latin America. The company has its potential clients companies and banks looking to bring retail and corporate fintech products. The Zeta cloud-native neo-banking platform supports the issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products.

The company’s enterprise solutions feature work with TnE cards, P-cards, expense management, salary disbursement, and corporate gifting.

The company has now accumulated over 2 million users, and three different banks and financial institutions. This also includes Sodexo, which use Zeta’s platform, and more than 14,000 corporate clients along with Amazon.

Various banks in India are using Zeta’s corporate gifting service. The newly raised capital will be used to expand the financial business for the company in regions like the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati. The company has signed contracts with many partners to aid the expansion in the next six months. Zeta employs about 450 people currently. It also plans to grow its team and set up offices in many more places across the globe.

Zeta is planning to disrupt the traditional banking structure. They are building a new and innovative technology stack that enables interesting use cases for banks and other bank-line financial institutions that want to issue credit, debit, or prepaid products. Through these products, they want to provide their customers with better functionalities.

Sodexo has been an important partner of Zeta since the year 2017 and they have a vision about how it could bring more value to Zeta. This investment will enable the Sodexo group to profit from Zeta’s complete suite of solutions and offer a seamless payment experience to the users. Zeta and Sodexo are working together on expanding Zeta’s platform across several Sodexo subsidiaries in various regions around the world.

The growth of these fintech startups depicts the scope the fintech industry has in the time to come. If you are an entrepreneur or a startup looking for a new business venture, finance could be the sector you can go for. You can depend on Coruscate as your technology partner and guide as we can help you out with the detailed market research and latest technology to power up your business. Connect with us for any further details regarding the Fintech app development.

Our latest Projects on Fintech :

The post Scope for Fintech App Development and Fintech startups : Know Fintech startups like MoneyLion and Zeta’s success story appeared first on Coruscate Solutions.

Peer to peer lending has come a long way since the financial meltdown and its not just a coincidence. It came around the time when the banks decided not to lend money to anyone. The decision brought many opportunities to the free market to provide the potential borrower with another way for people to borrow money. That is how the P2P phenomenon gained popularity. There are various technology platforms which help the consumers avail credit facilities.

One of the most popular platforms is Upstart which is the first platform using AI and machine learning to identify potential borrowers.

What is Upstart?

The company was founded by ex-Googlers including Dave Girouard, Paul Gu, and Anna Counselman. It was launched in April 2012. Upstart is the first online lending platform to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning for providing personal loans with the help of non-traditional variables like education and employment for predicting creditworthiness of a potential borrower. They have an income and default model to determine the creditworthiness of a borrower. In addition to traditional criteria involving the FICO score, credit reports, and income they use academic variables before lending money. They identify high-quality borrowers even if they have limited credit and employment history by using their background check like schools attended, area of study, and work experience.

The company offers fixed interest loans for three or five years to pay off credit cards, consolidate debt, to do huge shopping and to invest in vocational education. The platform is not just a direct-to-consumer lending platform but it also provides technology to banks, credit unions, and other partners through its software as a service model powered by Upstart.

Upstart has completed around seven years. In these seven years, the company has grown its business impressively. According to a new report in Venture Beat, CEO Dave Girouard said that more than $3.3 billion have originated from the platform in loans. The startup makes most of its revenue from the borrower’s fee or service charges. They have been a profitable business since the second half of the year 2018.

Upstart is among the growing companies which deal with peer-to-peer lendings. The platform matches borrowers with those willing to lend. A lot of other companies that are in competition with Upstart are Funding Circle, Prosper, and SoFi. Each of these fintech companies come from typical mortgages and home equity loans that are secured against significant collateral.

Upstart is different from the other existing fintech platforms because it uses machine learning and AI technologies to make credit decisions. People benefitted by the company are largely college students aged 28 to 35 and those who have an average of $12000 in credit card debt. The use of AI has also helped the startup to eliminate fraud and automate its verification processes. The person applying for a loan does not need to provide any documentation. The whole lengthy process of sitting through screening is eliminated as well.

Upstart considers itself a technology platform instead of a finance company. It has a deal with Customers Bank and its BankMobile division as a technology partner. So, it is one of the best combinations of finance and technology.

Upstart has made its AI platform available to other lenders as “Powered by Upstart” – a white label solution for a lending application to power their own lending platform. This service allows banks and other lenders to enforce their own credit policy and lending terms at the same time being benefitted from Upstart’s patent-pending risk modeling and automation.

Funding of Upstart

The company had a total of six funding rounds until today. The last funding round was held on 8th April 2019 in which the company has raised $50 million. This takes the total raised amount to $144.1 million. The CB rank of the company is 12,293.

Future of the Lending industry

Machine learning and AI are the existing technologies which are creating and carving a new future for the lending industry. The improvement in software that learns on itself and gets expected results is soon going to conquer the industry.

If you are a startup or entrepreneur, gear up to launch the fintech P2P software with AI to keep up with the new trends and earn more profits.

How?

Whenever in doubt, depend on the experts. You need to hire fintech app developers who can help you stay in the competition and win it too. We are here to help you with the new technologies. Our developers have expertise in AI and machine learning and they have created a lot of amazing apps and websites for our clients. We can proudly say that our clients have almost doubled their business after we launched the websites and apps for them. We have a 100% success rate for all our projects. We have made P2P applications according to the requirements of our client business that are running successfully.

If you are interested to know the basic cost and time required to build a basic P2P platform, here is an overview of the price chart.

We can help with the fintech app development according to your personalized business requirement. We can also help you out while selecting different features that are needed for your platform or app. Contact us for a free demo and any further queries.

Also read :

• Reasons to get ready with FinTech app development, and how ZestMoney is providing cardless EMIs
• 4 features of Zaver app to consider while FinTech app development

The post How Upstart, a Fintech lending platform raised $50 million with the help of AI and machine learning technology? appeared first on Coruscate Solutions.