U.K.-based digital lender OakNorth is using its tech platform as the pillar of its U.S. expansion strategy. The company, which has a U.K. banking license and is currently valued at $2.8 billion, is an anomaly among digital-only challenger banks because it’s been profitable for more than a year — a milestone that stands in contrast to the likes of Monzo, N26 and Starling Bank, which have yet to cross that mark. What makes OakNorth unique is its efforts to gain more bank customers through a white-label approach, whereby institutions plug directly into its lending technology platform.

Sean Hunter, the company’s chief information officer, told Bank Innovation that the company’s U.S. growth strategy is to expand the reach of its tech platform, which is called OakNorth Analytical Intelligence. By letting other institutions plug into its platform, the company can help them underwrite businesses that are underserved by traditional methods. It counts among its customers Dutch lender NIBC and other institutions in Europe and Asia, as well as a top U.S. bank it declined to name.

Despite its expansion plans, OakNorth has no plans to apply for a U.S. banking license. “It would only slow us down,” Hunter said. “We get a lot further by working with existing banks and using their balance sheet and relationships. Our mission is to be the Bloomberg of SME lending, in the same way Bloomberg is ubiquitous in the world of trading.”

The company’s tech platform is aimed at business customers in the middle: those whose needs are too complex for pure-play online lenders like OnDeck or Kabbage and too small for major banks to invest in a manual underwriting process they typically initiate for top-ticket loans. OakNorth Analytical Intelligence is aimed at businesses seeking to borrow between $750,000 to $1 million at the low end and $20 million to $25 million at the high end.

“Lending in this space is broken,” said Hunter. “At the low end, there’s a ton of fintech innovation, automating what is already a very commoditized service. For the high end, if you’re looking to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars, lending is still fundamentally the same as it was probably 50 to 60 years ago. It’s still pretty much a manual process.”

See Also: OakNorth expands consumer reach with Moneybox partnership

OakNorth’s platform, according to Hunter, is often for businesses with a growth story, and it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to underwrite companies — with some help from humans. A key differentiator is that it doesn’t use credit bureau data, but instead looks at sector-specific data and trends;  performance; and consumer sentiment data. He emphasized that its bank customers still make the final decisions on which loan applications get approved, using insights garnered from the OakNorth platform.

Institutions also are increasingly calling in OakNorth team members to train staff members to help. “What banks are saying is they want some of the OakNorth ‘special sauce,’ other than just the platform,” Hunter said. “The platform allows us to provide credit analysis and monitoring; clients are telling us they value the expertise OakNorth has around regulation and other parts of the credit decision process.” In addition, some U.S. clients ask OakNorth to handle the first part of the loan origination process, he noted.

While OakNorth executives originally thought their U.S. growth path be through small institutions, the ramp-up to large players has happened quicker than expected, according to Hunter. Still, he argued that regional institutions are the biggest opportunity for OakNorth in the U.S.

“We thought, for a long time, we would have to ‘earn our spares’ with regional banks and dream one day for the larger regional banks [to become customers,]” Hunter said. “The biggest value that we have to offer in the U.S. is probably to regional banks, while the very largest banks can often absorb additional costs.”

OakNorth has so far raised $848 million in primary funding since its creation, including $440 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund and the Clermont Group in February.