MoneyLion CEO: Checkout Extends Our Evolution From Neobank to Financial Services Marketplace

Call it a financial services ecosystem or even a financial services marketplace. But don’t call MoneyLion a neobank.

As CEO Dee Choubey told Karen Webster days after posting third-quarter earnings results, MoneyLion is on its way to becoming the place “mass market” consumers visit when they need a variety of financial services products, including insurance, investments, credit and bank accounts.

The company is taking a page from eCommerce giants to make those services easy to discover and “check out.” The consumer has an Amazon-like experience for getting a personal loan, mortgage, HELOC or insurance product since they don’t have to move from site to site comparing offers.

“If you think about what Amazon’s done, it’s that they’ve taken so many parts of the shopping experience and made it super simple,” Choubey said. “Behind that lies a lot of technology.”

Consumers can find everything from Amazon Basics batteries to Duracell batteries, making the choice that fits their needs. That simplicity is lacking in day-to-day financial life, Choubey said.

“In financial services, you’ve got a flea market,” he said.

No More ‘Flea Market’ Financial Services Experiences

The financial services shopping and checkout experience is full of friction, Choubey said. Consumers must provide their Social Security numbers, addresses, employer data and income verification to each lender, no matter if it’s a home equity loan or an auto loan.

MoneyLion’s one-stop ecosystem was built to offer access to a variety of services — without the friction of starting the application process fresh for each one, he said. The platform has connected nearly 19 million customers to more than 31 million financial services products.

Last month, the company launched MoneyLion Checkout, a marketplace that lets consumers search, apply for and complete transactions across third-party financial products like loans, credit cards and savings accounts.

Using consumer-permissioned data, the platform verifies millions of consumers, pre-filling applications as they browse and shop among MoneyLion’s financial services partners, which include Amazon, Visa and Mastercard for credit cards and Avant and Best Egg for personal loans.

The Linga Franca of Financial Services

“With 11 years of innovating for the consumer, we’ve been able to simplify and abstract away individual levels of underwriting or KYC, making it simpler for the consumer and becoming a lingua franca for multiple types of financial institutions, whether they are a bank, a specialty lender or FinTech, or credit card or auto loan providers,” he said. “We’re simplifying things for both sides.”

Although the company is in the early innings of Checkout, Choubey told Webster that a handful of large MoneyLion customers are already using the offering and have seen about 20% to 30% improvement in conversion rates.

The 90 Million Consumer Quarterly Funnel

Partner companies, the enterprise side of the business, connect to the MoneyLion network directly or via APIs.

The company’s enterprise business grew 17% in Q3 compared to Q2 and helped drive 23% top-line growth to $135 million. That growth is part of the company’s pivot away from being a direct-to-consumer model with first-party products that accounted for more than 90% of MoneyLion’s business.

MoneyLion is taking all the technology it built for its consumer business and making it available to enterprise partners, Choubey said.

Checkout allows providers to put their products in front of consumers as part of the marketplace along with verification of all the salient details for underwriting, he said.

“The promise we have for our enterprise clients is that we have built-in distribution with 90 million leads and inquiries coming through our ecosystem every quarter,” Choubey said.

Pent-Up Consumer Demand

As interest rates come down and loans become more affordable, Choubey predicted that pent-up consumer demand will fuel the consumer side of the model. The MoneyLion population broadly mirrors the U.S. economy, which has many paycheck-to-paycheck households. However, the MoneyLion customer’s annual income can range from $30,000 to $250,000, and the company’s approach is to give every consumer the same tools and treatment.

In September, the firm partnered with TransUnion to boost personalization within consumer finance. Financial institutions working with MoneyLion and using TransUnion’s data to inform their underwriting decisions can move beyond one or two dimensions of data that miss the true creditworthiness of a borrower.

“We’re linking that with bank verification data, and we’re now using a lot of AI to clean that data from both sides — the credit score data and the bank verification data — and we’re putting that together into a holistic, leading personal financial management tool,” he said.

Looking at the near-term roadmap, MoneyLion will be investing more actively in its brand, raising awareness among consumers, Choubey said.

“At some point in the next year, we can categorically state that this is a must-have for the mass audience of the United States,” he said. “It’s a business model where everybody wins.”

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