OakNorth, the next-generation credit and monitoring platform, today announces the signing of a commercial agreement with Customers Bank (NYSE: CUBI), which is a full-service bank that provides a range of banking and lending services to small and medium-sized businesses, professionals, individuals and families.
Products and services are available across the U.S. wherever permitted by law through mobile-first apps, online portals, and a network of offices and branches. Customers Bank had assets of approximately $11.5 billion as of December 31, 2019. The partnership will help Customers Bank achieve its goals of increasing and expanding commercial client relationships while driving a lower efficiency ratio and bolstering its already outstanding credit and risk culture.
OakNorth combines a deep understanding of credit, rich data sets (which include unconventional and previously unavailable data), cloud-computing, and state of the art machine learning, to provide its bank partners with the insight and foresight they need to more holistically and profitably lend to the Missing Middle – a multi-trillion-dollar market. The operating efficiencies realized through the OakNorth Platform allow banks’ relationship managers to focus more time with borrowers, having received insight on those borrowers and their sector.
Through 360-degree monitoring of borrowers’ financial and operational data, the Platform provides Customers Bank with early warning indicators in case of deterioration in credit quality, enabling it to have preliminary conversations with borrowers before negative credit issues arise – something that will prove invaluable during the economic recovery that will follow after the COVID-19 crisis abates.
Jay Sidhu, Chairman and CEO of Customers Bancorp, said: “Customers Bank uses a ‘high tech, high touch’ approach to delivering exceptional service. We are optimistic about the economic recovery that will come in the months ahead. When that time comes, the OakNorth platform will enhance our portfolio management capabilities with new market insights, further strengthening our customer engagement and credit quality while helping to speed up our underwriting and loan processes. The platform should improve portfolio risk management through the use of big data and AI, while providing relationship managers with a deep understanding of their borrowers and industry verticals.”
Rishi Khosla, co-founder of OakNorth, commented: “We built OakNorth to redefine business borrowing for the Missing Middle — the growth businesses who have been banking’s blind spot for decades but who are the backbone of economies and communities globally. Customers Bank has a clear understanding of the positive multiplier effect that supporting these businesses can have, and is partnering with us to ensure it can more holistically and profitably address their unique needs. Through enriched underwriting and leveraging credit science, we are providing partners such as Customers Bank with the insight and foresight to address the needs of the Missing Middle. Of course, we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, so in the short term, we will be working with Customers Bank to help it manage the portfolio risk associated with this.”