Eastern Labs recently went live with its first product since Eastern Bank launched the tech incubator, promising to deliver small business loans in under five minutes’ time.

Eastern’s “Express Business Loan” asks borrowers just four questions and then uses models built by Eastern Labs to mine myriad data sources and spit out a decision in just a few minutes, said Dan O’Malley, Eastern Bank’s chief digital officer and the head of Eastern Labs.

“The platform executes the existing credit policy of the bank that we’ve been in market with for seven years,” he told Banker & Tradesman. “It uses business credit data; it uses business health data from a variety of public sources; it uses secretary of state data; it uses personal credit data; it uses personal credit score; it uses information from the business’s checking account, information about the characteristics of the business through some of our data science models.”

O’Malley said Eastern Labs has been working on the loan product since October 2014, and it involved three rounds of testing, soliciting direct customer feedback, before the express loan went live.

The Express Business Loan provides up to $100,000 in working capital at rates ranging from 6.99 percent to 9.99 percent and can be provided with a Small Business Administration guarantee in an extra 2 to 3 minutes.

Eastern Labs first launched almost two years ago when Eastern Bank recruited O’Malley and his team after Perk Street Financial closed up shop. O’Malley was charged from the get-go with utilizing the vast stores of data Eastern already had access to in order to better craft products for its customers. With non-depository online lenders like Lending Club beginning to crowd the market, O’Malley called Eastern’s express loan “the return of the Jedi” and credited “every single group in the bank” with helping to make the new platform possible.

“It’s things like this that we came here to do,” he said. “This platform that powers the express loan is different than any other technology that exists in banking. Making a robust credit decision in real time, it’s just not done today, but it’s how customers are going to increasingly demand how their bank will interact with them. Customers want their time back and as banks we’re going to have to give it to them or we’ll go out of business.”