Trained at OnDeck, LendingFront Founders Help Banks Lend to Small Businesses

Yesterday LendingFront announced that it has raised $4 million to help deliver its white label software designed to help banks and other financial institutions lend to small businesses. The company was founded in 2015 by two former OnDeck employees, Jorge Sun and Dario Vergara.

Sun was the Chief Credit Officer at OnDeck from 2007 to 2012 and said he was the company’s third hire. Vergara joined OnDeck as its Chief Technology Officer in 2008 and was also among the first to join the company, Sun said. They both left before OnDeck went public in 2014 and took other jobs before reconnecting to create LendingFront together. Sun said that it is very difficult to create a technology company inside a large bank, which is what he tried to do in his job at Capital One, following his time at OnDeck. Vergara was working as VP of Technology at Bonobos, an online clothing company.

As Sun began talking with Vergara about going out on their own, he recalled telling Vergara:  “There are no platforms in this space directly created to help lenders become more efficient…We’ve built this once [at OnDeck], let’s build it again. But the difference now is it’s strictly a technology company. We take no risk, we don’t lend. All we’re doing is powering other lenders.”   

Sun said that LendingFront is “lender agnostic,” in that they license out their proprietary lending platform to any financial institution, including banks, community banks, leasing companies and Community Development Financial Institutions.

Their customers pay them a licensing fee and the customer, say a bank, sets its own parameters with regard to underwriting. The platform simplifies the underwriting process, but completely allows for customization and design of the customer experience, Sun said.

The idea of helping banks become better online lenders is not completely unique. In fact, the founders’ former employer, OnDeck, recently launched a separate entity called ODX, with the mission of making banks better lenders to small businesses.

But Sun said that while ODX and LendingFront both help banks, there is a difference between the two. He said the difference is that ODX is more of a full service shop acting on behalf of a bank.

“With us, a bank is using our platform like using Excel…versus [using] Excel and then giving it to a different company and saying ‘use Excel on our behalf.’”

Sun said that customers have funded $150 million through the LendingFront platform since they started licensing it out in 2016. They previously raised $1.6 million in 2016 and they employ 24 people in an office in New York.

Todd Stone was a reporter for deBanked.