Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 2)

Brock Blake: You asked about lenders. As I mentioned, we have 75 lenders on our platform. We have some of the big ones like Bank of America and American Express. We also have traditional banks. We have non-banks on our platform like OnDeck Capital, Kabbage, Funding Circle, and a bunch of those players that are non-bank lenders.

We have, I think, every type of business loan product out there on our platform. Let me explain that a little bit. You’re running a restaurant, landscaping, or a dry cleaner business. You go to your bank and apply for a loan and think “All banks are the same. They’re all going to have the same loan products. I’ve been with this bank for 10 years. If anyone’s going to give me a loan, it’s going to be this bank.” You go sit down and have a conversation.

What you realize is they say, “Sorry, you’re not a good fit.” What you find out is that every bank had a unique loan product where they underwrite you. There are a lot of different types of loan products and business lending. They can underwrite based on your cash flow, equipment or real estate that you might have, credit score, accounts receivable, or purchase order. There are many different loan products out there, but not every bank offers every loan product. They usually only offer once.

So just because you went to that one bank and got declined, I wouldn’t be discouraged by that. It just means that you probably went to the wrong bank. It’s like going to an Italian restaurant and trying to order Chinese food. They’re not going to serve that at that restaurant, so you just got to go to a different restaurant. That’s what we’re doing. We’ve gone out and tried to find the best lenders out there and the different loan products that have great customer experience. Then we bring them on to our platform and try and play that matchmaker through our technology and our customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: 1Mby1M focuses only on technology and technology-enabled services entrepreneurs. The restaurant and the laundromat and so forth aren’t part of our circle or community. The companies that you rattled out like OnDeck and Kabbage, we’ve covered all of them in depth. They’re working, very largely, in the audience that we work in which is e-commerce, digital goods, and so forth.

If you put the technology and technology-enabled services hat on, could you elaborate a bit on what are lenders looking for? You talked about receivables financing. That’s something that applies to the fast companies that start to get into some rhythm of revenues in monthly or annual recurring revenues. Oftentimes, the fast companies are niche. They don’t have enough of a market size to qualify for equities, but they would qualify for receivable financing and debt if they were put in front of the right kinds of lenders.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio
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