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Avant was founded in 2012 and has located it's headquarters in Chicago, IL.
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The 3 Co-Founders include; Al Goldstein (CEO), Paul Zhang (CTO), and John Sun. Of which, Al and Paul are still invovled with the company.
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The idea for this company comes from when John Sun was applying for a loan to which he found the process to be highly time consuming and frustrating. John Sun teamed up with Paul Zhangs' and his Y Combinator project to raise the initial $1 Million of seed funding.
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Today Avant is funded through numerous investors including; August Capital, QED Investors, KKR, RRE Ventures, DFJ, TIGERGLOBAL, General Atlantic, and Victory Park Capital. In 2015, Avant had raised more than $1.4 Billion in contributions by investors. Today it is estimated closer to $1.8 Billion in total funding and is currently valued at $2 Billion.
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Avant's mission is to lower the costs and barriers of borrowing for everyday people. Avant accomplishes this mission through 2 different ways; personal loans and credit cards. WebBank is the originator and issuer of the 2 Avant branded products and is serviced by Avant through their FinTech lending platform.
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Avant is based in America and solicites to United States customers only. Their primary target customers are middle-income earners with near-prime credit 580+>. World Bank Open Data gives us population sizes for middle income earners (here). This data allows us to compare the USA's population of middle income earners to the global population for middle income earners and see where global economic opportunities lie. Data from the domestic credit provided by the financial sector in the United States by Middle-Income earners (here). We can also show (here) how nonperforming loans for middle-income earners as a % of total gross has declined as traditional lending markets have evolved with FinTech firms such as Avant in the FinTech lending domain.
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*Product Benefits Listed Here
- Avant uses application and data tools from companies like JavaScript, Node.js, Bootstrap, PostgreSQL, Redis, Ruby, Amazon CloudFront and numerous others. Some utilities the company utilizes include Google Analytics, Mailgun and Optimizely. Their developers use the following innovative DevOps tools Docker, New Relic, Amazon EC2 Container Service and Circle CI for storage and scalability. Business Tools include G Suite, AdRoll, Olark and Help Scout to enhnace employee collaboration and customer experience. More Here...
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Avant has an outward reach in the FinTech industry specailizing in Lending, Payments/Billing, Open Banking, Personal Finance/Deposits/Online Banking.
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Online platforms, like Avant, are now giving the consumers control for borrowing money in the comfort of their own homes or environment. Gone are the days of walking into a "Bankers Office" at a brick and motar location to get approved or denied for a small loan or credit card to consolidate debt. We now have the technology in place with companies like Avant and others listed below to allow more flexability and transparency for personal loans and credit card approvals. Key innovations include quickness of approvals in less than 24 hours with funding same day, more data readily available to look at entire financial past, present and future, does not rely on FICO scores alone but other API's and KPI's. As mentioned above we have seen the default rates decrease since adopting these technologies.
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Other top key competitors to Avant include:
- Prosper - Peer-to-peer lending
- Lending Club - Direct consumer to investor lending
- SoFi - Higher loan amounts, up to $100,000.
- Upstart - Counts career path and education in underwriting
- NetCredit - Lower loan amounts, up to $10,500.
*View competitors Here
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Avant has created 450+ jobs for Marketing & PR, Operations, Sales & R&D, and Technology. All of which pay incomes to their employees from a range of $87,000 to above $100,000+, well above the US average income. They have also opened a facility to handle inbound customer resuests in Louisville, KY; spreading their footprint to smaller, growth ready domestic economies. Avant has also shown increasingly higher growth rates (i.e 2015 over 2014 167% increase). Knowing that their company market valuation is $2 Billion and total funding is $1.8 Billion, makes for a good case of positive outlook for future business ventures. Avant also provides a blog to educate people on making sound financial decisions and creative ways to earn or save extra money. Avant
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Every FintTech company manages based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In the Lending domain specifically it is important to measure: 1. Financials, 2. Customer, 3. Internal Processes, and 4. Learning and growth. KPIs
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Avant Financials - $2 B Market Valuation
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Avant Customers - FTC $3.85 Million Settlement
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Avant Internal Processes - Scaling to 'Amount'
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Avant has 800,000 users on their platform currently, only SoFi has them beat with 900,000 users. SoFi also has loaned more funds at $19B and Avant at $6.5B. SoFi is well on it's way to an IPO date and will leave Avant in it's shadows once they do. However, with the partnership of traditional banks through their newly developed 'Amount' software we should see scalability of Avants users and loan amounts increase in short order. This partnership will be the key to regaining the market as the top competitor.
- Avant has a great platform to evaluate FICO scores and additional data when considering loaning personal use of funds. However, they are limited to personal loans and credit card consolidation, which only exposes Avant to less than 6% of the total debt market. If Avant could use their current partnerships and leverage their platforms to reach into the mortgage, auto and retail lines of credit domains they could gain profits for their stakeholders by creating more daily users and increase total loan amounts. Auto loans and retail lines of credit would normally fit into their existing structure of >$35,000 loan limitations, mortgages might require more sources of funding with bigger banks. However, the technology might need to evolve to handle regulations of each new domain discussed above. Just as we have built a platform for customers transacting personal loans and credit card consolidation. We would need to research regulations for the above listed industries to ensure loans applied for are compliant and regulated to government standards. Also, provide the same access through Avants platform to lending institutions for larger purchases such as mortgages, autos and reatilers. Another great customer service initiative for the new Louisville branch would be an Avant branded live video-web chat with a real human in real time, similar to a Zoom/Microsoft Teams platforms. The mission would be simple: lower costs and barriers to borrow money, this time for your house, car and retailers alike!
ADDENDUM
- https://www.avant.com/about-us/
- https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=XT-US
- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FS.AST.DOMS.GD.ZS?locations=US-XT
- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FB.AST.NPER.ZS?locations=US-XT
- https://infoforinvestors.com/loans/loan-lender-reviews/avant-loan-review
- https://stackshare.io/avant/avant
- (https://www.finder.com/sites-like-avant)
- (https://craft.co/avantcredit)
- (https://medium.com/swlh/intro-to-kpis-for-fintech-82092070b156)
- (https://craft.co/avantcredit/metrics)
- (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2019/04/avant-settlement-new-financial-platforms-established)
- (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/avant-rebrands-its-financial-technology-saas-business-unit-as-amount-300718128.html)
- (https://www.investopedia.com/tech/worlds-top-10-fintech-companies-baba/)
- (https://www.investopedia.com/tech/worlds-top-10-fintech-companies-baba/)