Avant Crosses $3 Billion in Personal Loans

The naysayers of automated underwriting will have to be silenced again.

Chicago-based marketplace lender Avant, which uses big data and machine learning to underwrite loans announced that it has beat its online rivals as the first lender to cross $3 billion in personal loans in three years.

The four year old company has 440,000 customers and has issued 480,000 loans so far. It goes after the middle class consumers who take personal loans for an average of $8,000.

“This is a huge accomplishment and speaks to the market demand for affordable and accessible personal loans,” said CEO, Al Goldstein.

Much of its success came from the beefed up presence in the UK, a world leader in P2P lending — where the average loan size is 72 percent higher than the US on a per capita basis. The company hired key executives from MasterCard and HSBC after closing a Series E round from General Atlantic for $325 million last year. With that, it has so far raised $1.7 billion in total.