eric@defyneric
there’s one major difference between flex and most fintechs:
credit.
a lot of fintechs rely on third party lenders to provide capital. we don’t.
we lend out our own capital through our debt facilities and have built our own in house underwriting and risk team from the ground up.
the man leading our credit department previously managed over $200B in loans at Citi.
building credit in house has a few massive advantages:
1. flexibility
because we’re lending our own capital, we have far more flexibility on structure, pricing, limits, and repayment terms. we can evaluate businesses based on our own risk appetite instead of being boxed into someone else’s underwriting model.
2. better economics
cutting out the middleman means we’re not up charging on another lender’s pricing. that lets us offer far more competitive rates and better terms to our customers.
3. speed
our underwriting, risk, and credit team all sits under one roof. there is no back and forth approvals with external lending partners, which means we can move significantly faster when businesses need capital. typically banks can take up to 3 months to issue capital when our average approval time is 7-14 days.
4. ownership
we own the entire credit experience end to end. from underwriting to issuing the actual capital. this allows us to be flexible around niche scenarios and cater specifically to each business.
we currently have many hundreds of millions in active loans issued to business across 3 different credit products:
> net 60 day credit cards
> bill pay later
> working capital
our net 60 credit card offers businesses 60 days of free float and up to 2% cashback if you pay off your balance early.
this is heavily favored by many cash flow intensive businesses where revenue doesn’t hit their account until months later, industries like ecommerce brands and construction companies to name a few.
our second product, bill pay later, lets businesses finance larger ACH and wire payments for around 2–3% per month.
a good example is an ecommerce brand that needs to purchase $500k of inventory upfront but won’t see the proceeds until months later after the inventory has been sold and fulfilled.
it is mostly designed for businesses that have large expenses today but won’t see the revenue until much later.
our third and final credit product is working capital.
this is typically geared toward larger loans that require longer repayment terms, usually in the 6–8 month range.
a recent example was a business that needed $3M to acquire one of its competitors. we worked with them on every step of the way to evaluate whether the acquisition made strategic sense, determine a fair valuation, and ended up structuring a financing package that worked for both parties.
over the last few days i’ve personally brought in 20+ credit applications to flex. out of which realistically only around 5–7 of them will be probably be approved, and i actually consider that a good thing.
one of the biggest reasons many banks and fintechs go bust is because they issue bad credit.
i’ve seen applicants with a 550 fico score and literally $0.47 in their bank account (not even joking).
there’s no world where we’d approve a loan like that.
we’re extremely disciplined about who we extend credit to because building a healthy loan book is one of the most important parts of running a successful business in this industry.
our current health performance strongly reflects that. only around 0.05% of credit payments become delinquent or default (that’s 5% of 1% of all applicants, an industry best) and when a business does run into trouble, we do our best to work closely with them to structure a repayment plan that works for both sides rather than immediately taking an aggressive rude approach.
anyone can grow a loan book by approving everyone. building one that performs over the long term is the challenging (but most rewarding) part.