What The Future Of Personal Loans Looks Like — With SoLo Funds, No Banks Are Needed

This is the second installment of Benzinga's Fintech& series with FinTech Sandbox and its Boston Fintech Week, Sept. 27-29. To read the first installment, click here. 

In 2022, DeFi, short for decentralized finance, is a term that’s thrown around a lot. Whether it’s for a new crypto product or an alternative exchange, projects know that using the word DeFi can excite potential customers and investors.

SoLo Funds, a fintech startup based out of Los Angeles, encompasses DeFi in a way other companies don’t: by bringing truly decentralized finance to customers in a practical manner.

What SoLo Funds Does

SoLo Funds provides a new way to loan and borrow money. Typically, if you need a personal loan, you go to a bank or lender and sign a contract to borrow a certain amount of money and agree to pay a certain amount of interest and return the principal at the end of the term.

Instead, SoLo Funds connects borrowers and lenders directly. If you have $500 sitting around, you can lend it out through SoLo Funds to someone who needs it and then receive your money as well as a tip back.

“We discovered that loans for unplanned expenses are scarce,” SoLo Funds co-founder and Chairman Rodney Williams said. “Those unplanned expenses are really what cause disproportionately negative outcomes for average Americans.”

Most of the loans are short-term, up to 35 days, and for a few hundred dollars.

How Does SoLo Funds Vet Borrowers?

Most lending companies have some way of determining if a potential borrower is likely to pay back their loan. SoLo Funds is no different.

Instead of using credit scores, which can be misleading, SoLo Funds looks at someone’s cash flow, which is a truer measure of their likelihood to repay a loan.

“We believe that credit scores definitely don’t do a good job of assessing risk when a loan is for emergency needs,” Williams said. “The majority of our SoLo score is built on cash-flow data.

"We ingest the last 24 months of banking history via Plaid and that’s what we use to build our risk assessment score. Our repayment rates are three times better than the traditional average in the market.”

Click here to see SoLo's first commercial.

Photo: fizkes via Shutterstock