FI Data Platform Curinos Debuts Small Business Lending Consortium

Data intelligence firm Curinos rolled out a new small business lending platform Wednesday (June 22), allowing direct access for various originations metrics.

The platform, called LendersBenchmark, will offer weekly up-to-date originations data and metrics, delivering financial institutions the performance data and market insights to deal with small business lending portfolios.

This will let banks identify competitive positions and look into opportunities within their markets for things like bookings, pricings, cycle times and more, per the press release. Additionally, the solution is using a “give-to-get” model, letting participating lenders access origination and portfolio transaction data from Curinos.

From there, the data will be be anonymous and become available through pre-formatted reports and data visualization tools, letting lenders look at their competitive position and look into marker opportunities.

“LendersBenchmark® for Small Business Lending presents unlimited potential applications to financial institutions as they address their small business lending offerings, a critical business growth area for banks,” said Lindsay Burkhalter, director of consumer and small business lending at Curinos.

“Post-pandemic, small business lending opportunities have risen, with double-digit demand increases in both loan and line of credit products in 2022. As such, we developed this consortium to address how banks can identify opportunities to take their share of the demand.”

Earlier this year, Curinos’ research discovered that banks and FinTechs that had redone their overdraft policies had been adding more new customers, PYMNTS wrote.

See also: More Banks Ditching Lucrative Overdraft Fees

This came as more banks were eliminating overdraft fees, which have been criticized as discriminatory to lower-budget, underserved users.

That’s happening in turn because there has been a rise in FinTechs offering zero-fee services, and as politicians like Elizabeth Warren have called out banks for continuing to use the practice.

According to Brendan Coughlin, head of banking with Citizens Financial, there’s been a good economic trade-off with having a more “forgiving” fee structure.