The new loan options, announced Wednesday (March 25), include six-year and and seven-year terms and are designed to help finance higher-cost home improvement projects.
“These extended terms provide homeowners with greater payment flexibility while helping contractors and service providers improve affordability and conversion at the point of sale,” the bank said in a news release.
In addition to product enhancements, Avvance is also expanding its network of partners, including Skeps, a “multi-lender orchestration” platform that lets merchants connect customers with the most appropriate offers from a range of lenders.
“The addition of Avvance to Skeps collection of lending partners, puts Avvance in the hands of more merchants who want to provide flexible financing at the point of need and within their customer checkout and decision-making workflows,” the release added.
In addition to home improvement, the bank said Avvance provides financing for segments that include audiology, elective healthcare and other big-ticket categories, “so partners can offer trusted financing wherever customers are making important purchasing decisions.”
The new offerings come at a time when—per recent PYMNTS Intelligence research—a growing number of American consumers are using credit not simply because they must, but because they think of it as a flexible financial tool that meets different needs at different moments.
The research revealed that credit has evolved into something more nuanced than a simple borrowing instrument. Consumers increasingly treat it as a mix of planning tool, safety net and financial strategy.
“For banks and card issuers, this shift exposes a deeper story about why people turn to credit in the first place and how those motivations are changing,” PYMNTS wrote.
Meanwhile, additional PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that embedded financing offerings are at an inflection point. Companies say embedded finance is still strategically important, but are becoming more selective about how they use it and the partners they work with.
“Whether a business trusts an embedded finance provider has overtaken speed and price as the most important factor in choosing it as a partner, especially among business-to-business companies,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “These firms operate deeper in the financial stack, where outages, compliance failures and data issues carry real consequences. For them, reliability and governance now matter more than fast launches.”