EXCLUSIVE— Banks are jostling with fintechs as well as incumbent competitors for customers among a rising demand for personal loans, especially as fintechs seek to create faster, more user-friendly versions of such products.

The one advantage banks have over fintechs? Branches, Shayan Khwaja, BBVA Compass executive director of consumer lending told Bank Innovation. Based in the “Sunbelt” (headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama), BBVA Compass is a subsidiary of Spanish bank BBVA, and has about $86 million in assets, according to corporate statements.

BVVA Compass recently launched its “Express Personal Loan” this week, an unsecured loan that can range between $2,000-$35,000, Khwaja said. The loan is digital end-to-end, a factor that “represents months of effort across the entirety of the bank,” the company said in this week’s press release.

But with multiple fintechs and banks putting a variety of their products fully online, what differentiates this personal loan from its competitors? When asked, Khwaja told Bank Innovation in an emailed statement:

As a bank, BBVA Compass offers other financial products that customers will have easy access to in order to better take control of their financial lives, and as mentioned above with Express Personal Loan, checking, and savings, we also have the digital channels to serve them up. The customer can then use these channels to better manage their financial lives.

Beyond that, for customers located inside our physical footprint, branches allow them the option of having an in-person conversation about their individual financial journey and the financial products they own. A physical network is an advantage fintech competitors do not have.

While this is true, it is also noteworthy that many fintechs (as well as a few fully-fledged banks) no longer think this is an advantage they need to reach consumers. None of the top fintech lenders, including LendingClub, Prosper, Orchard, and SoFi, have expressed interest in opening a branch, and (despite some turmoil) they have kept pulling in customers through 2017 and into this year. The rise of such fintechs could be one of the reasons personal loans are seeing a recurrence in popularity, Khwaja says, stating via email:

There could be a variety of factors that account for the rise in personal loan demand. Among them are consumers who are taking advantage of the lower interest rates that personal loans typically carry as compared to credit cards… Beyond that, personal loans have become more broadly available with the rise of fintechs and banks who are entering the digital lending market, and with the economy and job market stable and solid, consumers are spending more. So, availability and demand are both favorable.

Aside from pure lenders, banks themselves seem ambivalent on the continued future of the branch — while several banks, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, have announced plans to create new branches in 2018, they’ve also announced plans to shutter older branches.

However, banks have not yet let go of another key advantage when it comes to lending and financial products. Khwaja notes:

As a financial institution, BBVA Compass already has the needed funding for loans, as well as the customer relationships and physical network.

Funding, whether it’s for personal loans, investment, or other uses of capital, has remained very much the purview of incumbent banks. Whether they will continue to provide it via physical branches, we will have to see.