Just 12 days ago we announced the availability of traditional 3-year loans on Upstart. Since then, more than 1,000 people have applied for rates on our platform. Today, we’re happy to announce that Ranger Capital Group will begin to invest in Upstart loans this month.
Ranger Capital Group offers traditional and alternative investment opportunities to institutional and high net worth individual investors. Ranger-affiliated investment advisors currently manage over $3B in assets. The Ranger Specialty Income Fund uses a proprietary artificial intelligence system known as TruSight Technology™ to evaluate, select, and invest in peer-to-peer loans.
While we’re still in the first inning for loans on Upstart (ok, top of the first), we’re committed to providing smarter loans to high quality borrowers not served well by other lenders. And we’re thrilled to have partners such as Ranger to help us on our mission.
We are excited to make this announcement on the first day of the LendIt Conference, where our co-founders, Dave Girouard and Paul Gu, will be participating in panels discussing the impact of our loans and use of big data for underwriting.
Dave will be speaking today on the “Impact and Innovation” panel. While the other panel participants –including Premal Sha from Kiva and Chris Walcott from Semble – are focused on impact from a philanthropic standpoint, we are focused on the impact of looking beyond credit to identify quality borrowers.
Online lending has transformed the global banking industry, but it still relies on underwriting that is unable to differentiate between youth and risk. Our unique model enables us to identify high quality borrowers, despite sparse credit history and minimal work experience. By better understanding an applicant’s ability and propensity to repay, we have cracked open this previously unserved market.
Our data-driven underwriting model will be the focus of Paul’s panel, “Big Data in Credit Decisioning”.
We hope to see you there. If you can’t make it follow us on Twitter and check back for an update with videos of our panels.
Panels:
Monday, 5/5 at 2:15 PM: Impact and Innovation
Tuesday, 5/6 at 1:30 PM: Big Data in Credit Decisioning