Episode Details

Summary:

In this 5th episode of the Fintech Impact podcast, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews Cato Pastoll, the Co-Founder and CEO of Lending Loop – an alternative lending source. Lending Loop mixes peer-to-peer lending with crowdsourcing along with artificial intelligence. Find out the story from Cato Pastoll about how in 15 months Lending Loop has managed to give out over $16 million in loans – and has an average monthly business growth of 20%. 

Show Notes:

●     01:02 – Lending Loop is an online lending marketplace. They connect

                    Canadian investors that are looking for more attractive returns on their

                    savings with small businesses that are looking for a more affordable source

                    of financing. 

●     01:34 – Both of Cato’s parents were small business owners, which taught him the

                    difficulties in finding financing. These lending platforms have been popular

                    in the UK since 2005 and since 2008 in the US, but not in Canada. Lending

                    Loop started in 2016.

●     04:00 – Marketplaces aren’t easy to start or scale – and it has been hard to do in

                    Canada because of the regulatory hurdles.

●     05:14 – Lending Loop lets you sign up as a lender or a borrower. They curate

                    applications, review them, and make sure they are credit-worthy. Only 10%

                    approval rate, over $16 million lent and about $2 million per month with a

                    20% monthly growth rate.

●     06:24 – Loans are crowdsourced, you can pledge as little as $25 towards a loan.

                    You can build a portfolio with $2,500 across 100 different companies if you

                    wanted to.

●     07:44 – You are able to establish the criteria for the types of businesses you lend

                    to. Their auto-lend platform will allocate your money for you. Regular bank

                    deposits into Lending Loop are possible.

●     08:45 – The rates range from 5.9% to the mid-20%.

●     10:46 – QuickBooks is integrated with Lending Loop.

●     13:12 – Lending Loop makes money from an origination fee of between 2.5 to 6.5%

                   of the loan as a one-time fee, as well as a spread of a 1.5% annual fee

                   on every repayment.

●     14:20 – Businesses are given a letter grade based on the risk of repaying their   

                    loans – which also determines their interest rate, with worst percentage

                    being only about 10% risk of default.

●     16:33 – All of their success and all of their failures are posted directly on their

                    website for full transparency. The largest loan to date has been about

                    $200,000.

●     17:44 – The main focus is to scale the platform.

●     19:04 – The market reception and demand has been great. There has been

                    skepticism from the more traditional members of the industry.

●     20:38 – Low investments have allowed people to try it out to make sure it is real –

                    then invest more later.

●     22:05 – Businesses provides a summary of what they are looking to use

                    the money for, what the business does, why they are safe to lend to, a little

                    bit about their financial performance.

●     24:26 – The challenges have included: general awareness, and providing financial

                    literacy for people.

●     26:42 – Lending Loop currently has a team of 20.

●     30:47 – The demographics of the borrowers: no industry makes up more than 9%

                    o