A Meeting of Old Friends

Everyone in the industry knows Peter Renton, and if you know Peter, you know that he’s poured his heart and soul into this industry for way over a decade. Peter Renton, Bo Brustkern and Jason Jones were the original founders of a lending conference called LendIt. 

LendIt was one of the first fintech lending conferences that spanned across North America, Europe and Asia. It was the only conference where I attended almost every year and met a ton of friends and colleagues that I am still in touch with today.

This history is important to me because my entire fintech career has been reflected by the decade long conference programming. One of my first startups called Fluid Credit was a platform trying to build credit for college students. LendIt gave me an opportunity to pitch on stage about my idea in the credit build space almost a decade ago.

One of the best awards I’ve gotten personally was the LendIt Choice Award in 2017. I remember Jason Jones handed that over to me and I was the happiest guy in fintech that day. The sense of camaraderie and friendship focused into one of those special moments of my life. I still have it displayed right next to me in my office.

Coming back onto Peter’s Podcast, which is the longest FinTech One on One Podcast show in our industry is a bit of a home coming and I am honored twice over for this opportunity. Given Peter is one of the best chroniclers of our fintech industry, it’s extra special to check back with the fintech home base and talk about all that’s transpired over the years.

In some ways, the new company that’ve built 2 years ago with Sam Xia has a lot to do with my experience in building technologies in the fintech space. I couldn’t wait to get with Peter and jam on this new venture.

From "Fluid" to "LendAPI"

A decade ago, I had this idea of giving credit to college students and helping them to build credit while they are getting an education. With the Credit Card Responsibility Act of 2009, credit card companies are being put on notice when dishing out those starter credit cards on campuses.

Credit card companies have to gather proof of independent income from students to issue these credit cards. The intent from this legislation is great and it helps predatory lending companies from going after vulnerable students or students that didn’t have the proper financial education before entering into a contract that they didn’t understand.

The unintended consequence was that this rule prevented millions of college students from getting their first credit card which was used to build their credit. There was a void in the credit spectrum that was getting bigger by the day.

My thought was that Fluid Credit was there to fill in the blank and instead of a credit card with hefty fees and compounding interesting, I can offer something with low interest, fixed term installment loans and continue to report credit obligations to the credit bureaus to build credit for the 15-20 million college students across the United States.

I pivoted from a B2C play to a B2B quickly. I understood that the biggest issue that existed and still exists was the problem of launching new products. Years and millions were spent to build products that should have been commoditized. A ton of custom software development agencies are praying on fintech startups and scale-ups alike staffed with people that didn’t have any banking experience.

That’s why I built LendAPI. A zero friction, launch by yourself platform that takes you away from frustrating requirements calls, endless sprint delays and expensive hourly rates. I wanted this entire industry to change how it launches new financial products.

The "Build vs. Buy" Debate is Dead

The build vs buy debate is truly dead. I would venture to say that it’s now a debate of build vs. launch.

We’ve helped countless startups and scale-ups and 100 year old institutions to launch new products within weeks, months, not years and are spending millions of dollars to hire teams that they can’t manage.

We are solving the biggest issue in FinTech and that is to launch any financial product instantly and stay competitive not to their peers but to their customers expectations. 

We speak to a ton of CTOs at various finance and banking institutions, they are tired. They have a mountain of knowledge building systems and stitching together systems throughout their career and we can tell that they are tired of doing the same thing over and over again. LendAPI is that solution they’ve been waiting for, we give them the flexibility to build if they like or launch if they are under a time crunch. It’s the best of both worlds.

In their minds, “this stuff should’ve been commoditized a long time ago.”. We agree and we often give the example of building websites in the 90s. Back in the days, you had to code and hire a team of people to build a website that today would take you a few hours to build with any skillset.

Sometimes we’ve been compared to GoDaddy of FinTech and we take that as a great compliment. There’s no reason why any financial institution or retailers can’t login, take a template and launch their products.

We spent years building a platform where folks of any technical background or no technical background at all can login and build/configure their products, rulesets and manage their loans in an all compliant platform to launch their products. We’ve completely changed the way launching products should feel like.

Pragmatic AI (Not Hype)

Peter and I talked in length about A.I. and I wrote a personal article about how A.I. is an evasive species but we must adapt to it just like the flu virus that plagues the entire population annually. 

Automated Lending is a scary thought for a lot of people. It’s always easy to raise the compliance card and cite a slew of alphabet soup regulations that’s hard to argue against. Often, in the same conversation, banking executives want A.I. and automation. 

When pushed on their branch expansion plan and human capital strategies, they almost always defer to A.I. to help to double their assets under management without a whole lot of human intervention. 

Our clients are pulling us into automating mundane tasks such as answering emails, sms, attachments as well as back office automation tools to summarize a complex credit report and build new strategies without having to point and click to speed up their thinking process.

Our Doc AI, ARC AI products are servicing many clients already to automate as much as possible with consistency and accuracy. These tools serve as co-pilots for underwriters or whomever that’s interested in exploring deeper into nuisance lending concepts.

We reflect on all of the AI tools that’s been built in the past 6 months and there’s a theme that’s likely to be adopted by users. Single-task-agents. 

These agents have one task in mind, whether it’s scanning documents, responding to emails and SMSs or building a risk strategy rule, they perform well without hallucinating and the results are trackable, traceable and most importantly deterministic. We like these single-task-agents and we are building more of these to serve our clients in the most efficient way possible.

The "Five Verticals" of the Future

We see a huge future in embedded finance. There are some pure-play lenders out there that’s capturing the attention of merchants, retailers. But they are cutting out the other participants, banks, credit unions and most of the capital market participants. We want to democratize it.

Mortgages, consumer loans, credit cards, auto financing, elective surgery and even marine equipment financing are all categories that require enterprise level software to manage merchants, branches, offices and brokers. LendAPI is the bridge to completely free up the lenders and banks merchants want to work with and no longer beholden to one particular lending partner that gives merchants zero control over their destiny.

We are fully engaged and invested in embedded financing and provide critical financing software for banks to enter into the market and work with merchants directly or give the same power to the merchants to control and protect their entire brand identity. 

Whatever the angle and use case it might be, our platform is omni-directional and can cater to any participant into the new embedded financing economy. 

There are still old guards in the software or infrastructure space that purposely choke out their partners by increasing fees, decreasing features and lengthen development cycles. I truly believe that banks and credit unions failed to compete in this space because of legacy software.

If you want to break free from legacy systems that prevent you from meeting new members where they live, shop and play, you should build with LendAPI and extend your brand all the way to where the consumers shop or make that critical moment-of-truth purchase decision.

What’s Next?

We have a lot to do, a lot to build. But something that’s staying true to us is our vision statement. “Launch any financial products instantly.”. 

Our mission is always staying ahead of the innovation curve and delivering tools, features that’s programmatic and useful for credit unions to become what they always meant to be, the friendly faces of financial services and now they can truly shine through an enterprise system where their members spend time.

I want to thank Peter Renton for a decade of friendship and the advice he’s afforded me is valuable and we all appreciate his guidance.

If you want to listen to Peter Renton and I talk about the future of lending technology, please click, here.

About LendAPI

LendAPI is the core infrastructure for embedded finance, known as one of the fastest-growing embedded finance infrastructure companies in the world. Since its inception in 2024, the platform has provided market leadership in indirect financing across industries ranging from automotive and marine equipment to luxury consumer goods and services. Our technology enables a variety of indirect lending scenarios, delivering millions of financing opportunities for banks, credit unions, retailers, and fintechs. LendAPI provides a complete, private-labeled solution, from customer experience and administrative tools (including in-store co-pilots) to loan servicing, compliance, and licensing support, to launch in-house BNPL products quickly and efficiently.