[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Timothy Li, Co-Founder and Board Member of LendFoundry.com. LendFoundry is a Silver sponsor at LendIt USA 2016, which will take place on April 11-12, 2016, in San Francisco.]
It is evidential that the FinTech revolution is here to stay. Come April 11, thousands of FinTech enthusiasts will converge in San Francisco for the 4th annual LendIt USA conference. Let’s take a moment to reflect upon this amazing evolution and prepare for the enormous task that lies ahead of us.
The FinTech revolution began in the 1950s with the advent of credit cards, continued in the 60s and 70s with the arrival of ATMs and the growing popularity of Electronic Stock Trading. The 80s brought personal computing into the finance world and the 90s introduced internet e-commerce. It’s a continuous and exponential evolution including recent innovations such as; mobile wallets, robo-advisors, blockchain, equity crowdfunding and online lending. Today, we can’t begin to imagine ourselves living without these wonderful FinTech inventions.
According to Forbes, there are over 6,500+ FinTech startups around the world and over $24 billion dollars have been invested in them, with over $11 billion dollars invested in FinTech startups in the first three quarters of 2015. This massive amount of investment and talent is disrupting each part of the FinTech lending ecosystem. Be it the ever changing regulatory and compliance environment or the adoption of market lending over balance sheet lending, FinTech lending is evolving at a break-neck pace. Some days, it almost feels like we are living through these changes in real-time.
To stay on top of such a disruptive environment, marketplace lenders need cutting-edge technology. Most of them grapple with the question of whether their firm should focus on the “Fin” or the “Tech” part of the business. We deeply believe that these FinTech founders shouldn’t have to make a choice. They deserve a best in class FinTech Operating System which allows them to focus on marketing, compliance, operations and most importantly, customer service and portfolio management. The demand for a truly modern and integrated ‘FinTech Lending Operating System’ cannot be ignored.
The major parts of any FinTech Lending Operating System are the Loan Origination System (LOS) and Loan Management System (LMS). In the past few decades, most LOSs and LMSs have not had a facelift to meet the needs of today’s FinTech players. Connecting to new identity, credit, analytics, and payments system takes an enormous amount of resources to integrate. Lenders slowly lose their competitive advantage as they get restricted by their technical constraints. In addition, the licensing and pricing approach of these older systems leave much to be desired.
There are a few well respected firms that have come closer to addressing these challenges by successfully enhancing various aspects of the FinTech Operating System. But none have the complete and commercially viable platform yet. It leaves FinTech technologists to piece together the puzzle which often ends up costing them more time and resources. Indeed, the entire lending industry is in the search of the next FinTech Lending Operating System.
In 2013, my co-founder and I started on the path of developing such a Lending Operating System with a mission to provide a truly modern, extensible, and beautifully crafted platform. We called it LendFoundry. With this mission and a talent pool of some of the best architects and engineers, LendFoundry is now the trusted platform of some large online lending companies in North America. We realize that our mission may never be finished but we know that our dedication could one day make a huge impact to the community which we serve and love.
Come, experience the growth of LendFoundry at our booth #812 and take a look at the next FinTech Lending Operating System!
On behalf of everyone at LendFoundry, we wish all the attendees and exhibitors at LendIt 2016 – San Francisco a successful conference!
The host of this blog, LendIt, is the largest conference series dedicated to connecting the global online lending community. Our conferences bring together the leading lending platforms, investors, and service providers in our industry for unparalleled educational, networking, and business development opportunities. LendIt hosts three conferences annually: our flagship conference LendIt USA as well as LendIt Europe in London and LendIt China in Shanghai. Visit our home page to register for the next event and to subscribe to our newsletter.
