| Radius Bank this week announced it will team up with an online marketplace lender to offer a new personal loan product to its customer base.
The partnership with Prosper will be the fourth for the $744 million bank, based in Boston’s Seaport District. Radius Bank, formerly known as First Trade Union Bank, has previously partnered with other fintech startups, including LevelUp, Smarter Bucks and Aspiration.
Chris Tremont, Radius Bank’s executive vice president of virtual banking, said that he met the Prosper team at a conference in March, and they immediately hit it off.
“We’ve been talking for about six months about how we make this work,” he said. “We love what they’re doing in the consumer lending space in terms of leveraging technology to provide consumers with a lower cost solution to get financing.”
In the weeks ahead, Radius Bank customers will be able to apply for unsecured consumer loans ranging from $2,000 to $35,000 through the Prosper platform via a co-branded landing page on Radius Bank’s website.
The announcement was also the first of its kind for Prosper, said Chief Business Officer Itzik Cohen.
“You don’t see a lot of banks yet who are using a marketplace lender to offer a product to its own customers,” Cohen told Banker & Tradesman. “From a technology perspective, it was a good match between two companies.”
Last year, he said, the peer-to-peer lending platform originated more than $1.6 billion in loans, and Cohen said he expects this to be the first of many similar announcements from Prosper.
Meanwhile, Tremont said the partnership helps fill out Radius Bank’s complement of product offerings. The bank focuses largely on commercial lending and did not offer an unsecured consumer loan product – something he said bank management had repeatedly seen demand for among its customer base.
“We hear it in clients contacting the bank and we’ll do surveys throughout the year,” he said. “A consumer lending product in the form of an unsecured loan comes up quite a bit, so that was a bit of the impetus in going out and partnering with a company like Prosper.”
