{"id":15118,"date":"2016-11-16T18:03:29","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/the-limits-of-fintech-disruption\/"},"modified":"2016-11-16T18:04:40","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:04:40","slug":"the-limits-of-fintech-disruption","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/the-limits-of-fintech-disruption\/","title":{"rendered":"The Limits of FinTech Disruption"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cSilicon Valley is coming\u201d \u2013 Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase\u2019s Chairman & CEO [1]<\/p>\n
Banks and specialty lenders are facing a growing risk of disintermediation by a class of financial technology startups known as \u2018marketplace lenders.\u2019 Historically, banks and specialty lenders served the role of financial intermediaries, arranging loans between those that needed to borrow and those that needed to save. Over the last five years, however, various tech-enabled, marketplace lenders have attempted to disrupt this traditional intermediary role by directly connecting borrowers and investors via an online marketplace. Marketplace lenders have targeted consumer lending (LendingClub, Avant), small business lending (OnDeck, Kabbage), student lending (Sofi, Earnest), and various other asset classes with their scalable, low-touch online origination and servicing platforms. In response, traditional lenders such as OneMain Holdings (\u201cOneMain\u201d) have been forced to evolve and adapt by weighing the decision to digitize against the benefits of their traditional high-touch, customer-facing branch networks.<\/p>\n
OneMain Holdings (\u201cOneMain\u201d) is the nation\u2019s largest branch-based nonprime consumer lender in the U.S. with 1,800+ branches in 43 states.\u00a0 In fact, ~90% of Americans live within 25 miles of a OneMain branch giving OneMain greater coverage of the U.S. population than Wells Fargo. [2] Through this extensive branch network, OneMain provides loans to nonprime consumers whose access to credit is otherwise expensive and inefficient.<\/p>\n