Noble aims to help companies extend lines of credit to customers.


Lines of credit are a profitable product. American consumers alone pay $120 billion in credit card interest and fees each year, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Given the revenue potential, it is not surprising that there is sustained interest from both start-ups and established companies to offer loan-based products. But challenges stand in the way, including – but not limited to – complying with local laws and regulations and modeling credit risk.

Enter Noble in the form of a platform that allows businesses to build credit-based products like credit cards and buy now and then pay for services without coding tools. Founded by WeWork veterans, Noble enables clients to connect data sources to create customized loan offers by providing a rules-based engine to edit and launch loan models.

Noble today announced the closing of a $15 million Series A round led by Insight Partners, along with Cross River Digital Ventures, Plug & Play Ventures, Y Combinator, Flexport Fund, TLV Partners, Operator Partners, Verissimo Ventures, Interplay Ventures and the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The new cash brings the company’s total to $18 million, which CEO Tomer Bigger said will help TechCrunch open a new office and expand Noble’s portfolio to support more use cases.

Connecting Data Sources in the Noble Admin Dashboard. Image Credits: Hon

Bigger and Noble CTO Moran Mishan worked together on a collaborative infrastructure at WeWork to screen and evaluate tenants’ creditworthiness. Prior to WeWork, Bigger was a product manager responsible for the underwriting infrastructure of business-to-business (B2B) lender Behal, and Mishan was a software engineer at Woo.io, a job candidate sourcing platform.

“From these first experiences, [we] He’s seen how complex it is for companies to build infrastructure and launch new loan-based products, and Noble aims to change that, Bigger told TechCrunch in an email interview. “[We allow] For companies to launch more products that their end customers want – access to credit.

With Noble, companies can access credit bureaus, banks and income verification providers to determine which customers should extend lines of credit (e.g. loans and cash). The platform’s interface allows businesses to deploy workflows that automatically approve, accept or refer users, with the back end to match the experience to the brand and customize audited data from a single view.

“This increases lifetime value, increases customer retention and ultimately can be a completely new source of revenue for companies,” Bigger asserted. “Dignified Power… encourages companies to do things faster and more efficiently without spending a lot of internal engineering or production resources.

Insight Partners principal Daniel Aronovitz sees Noble’s core clients as fintechs, software-as-a-service companies from financial services and B2B marketplaces and wholesalers. It’s early days, but the company already has “tens” of customers, including major fintechs, with “millions of dollars” in loans secured through Noble’s platform.

“With its strong product offering and impressive founding team, Noble has already acquired B2B and business-to-consumer customers for use cases,” Aronovitz said in an emailed statement. “Noble has created a platform for credit infrastructure as a service, enabling any company to build proprietary credit products in-house.”

Hon

Conditional logic in Noble’s loan determination engine. Image Credits: Hon

But Noble is not unique in providing credit infrastructure. Fintech startup Alloy, which raised $100 million last year at a $1.35 billion valuation, recently expanded into automated credit. Stilt raised $114 million in March to expand its loan offerings. There are also firms like Last that focus on loan products for small and medium businesses.

Bigger, on the other hand, believes that because the market is strong, Noble is not in danger of being overwhelmed. He’s not necessarily wrong — point-of-sale loans in the US are expected to grow from 7% of unsecured loan balances (ie, no collateral) in 2019 to 13% to 15% of balances by 2023, McKinsey reports. In the year By 2023, the report projects that “quad-pay” players — meaning vendors like Klarna and Afterpay — will generate $90 billion a year and generate $4 billion to $6 billion in revenue.

Of course, loan products do not guarantee a profit – the purchase now, the payment later has a particularly high loss and the prices are reduced as of late. But Noble’s small-but-growing customer base proves that some companies are at least buying into the sales pitch and perhaps seeing some success.

“There are many challenges that companies face when they want to build credit products, including compliance, debt financing and underwriting,” Bigger said. “Noble’s mission is to remove these barriers and move credit experiences from offline to online, just as payment processing platforms have built the new payment channels that have enabled the explosive growth of online payments over the past decade.”



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