How Alternative Finance is Changing the Financial Landscape

The field of alternate finance is expanding quickly thanks to fintech, data technology, and investor awareness. Alternative lenders use technology to meet the underserved needs of small businesses while transforming the lending landscape, from cutting-edge loan options to streamlined approvals driven by data analytics. The opportunity to enter the lending market presented by the rise of fintech changed the lending industry, which is now home to both traditional banks and alternative lenders.

Alternative lenders have the technological capacity to process easy financing solutions and generate profitable interest on greater volumes of smaller loans, whereas banks have traditional finance models, the authority, and the resources to make interest with fewer large corporate multimillion-dollar loans. Banks and alternative lenders are competitors in the lending market today, but their differences have helped to create a favorable environment for both over the past ten years.

Technology Driven Competition

Designing systems that use big data technology in order to increase efficiency and generate larger profits is the foundation of fintech ideation. By concentrating on this technological advancement to process hard data and better analyse risk, the fintech lending industry disrupted long-standing incumbent banks. Alternative lenders provide alternative lending models in the form of debt financing solutions, better acceptance rates, quicker loan approvals, and maximum customer satisfaction thanks to streamlined data collection and lending underwriting processes.

Alternative lenders have higher approval ratings than traditional banks due to their ability to assess more factors than the traditional credit score of historic data on previous loan repayments. High approval ratings are possible thanks to the detailed data alternative lenders can collect and analyze using a combination of algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to better determine an applicant’s creditworthiness and risk.

Fintech lenders use alternative credit scoring to assess applicants’ digital footprint to determine creditworthiness such as rent, utility, and telecom payments, in-depth bank account details and behavior, and social media engagement to gather an accurate picture of integrity and intentions.

With the ability to evaluate thousands of data points, alternative lenders are able to capture more segments of smaller businesses that would have otherwise reported a poor traditional credit score. Focusing on current financial discipline, habits, and other interactions provide better accuracy of applicants’ ability, stability, and intent of paying back borrowed funds compared to traditional scoring methods.

In addition to providing loans to SMBs that might not otherwise be eligible for a commercial bank loan, alternative lenders also provide more debt financing solutions and a better customer experience. More than 40% of the 5,200 retail consumers surveyed by Oracle believe nonbank financial institutions provide superior investment services to traditional banks. A borrower can frequently upload the necessary statements, pay stubs, and other supporting documents to get pre-approval letters in some cases almost instantly. Fintech's quick loan approvals and expedited lending decisions can provide small businesses with funding in a matter of weeks or even days.

Traditional banks have not turned a blind eye to the power of streamlined IT processes; to combat competition some have bought non-traditional lending or alternate finance companies, and others have made partnerships with alternative lenders. Most banks have adopted tech capabilities with electronic payment and online services, but innovation is much easier to develop in an IT environment packing in as many possible applications onto one platform. For a large bank, implementing a new core-banking system costs an average of $1 billion. At the end of the day, banks live within different finance and business models than alternative lenders and are chartered by government regulations. Compared to private lenders’ AI data collection, traditional banks cannot become as flexible nor offer a variety of loans to less desired clients while leaving SMBs without the financing they need.

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