After five years plying the subprime lending sector, ZestFinance is finally moving into near-prime credit for debt consolidation.

Known for its Big Data-driven loan underwriting for deep subprime customers, ZestFinance launched a near-prime personal loan product yesterday called Basix. This is just the company’s second direct loan product for consumers. Its first was ZestCash, designed as a payday loan alternative for subprime customers lacking access to traditional credit.

Basix loans will offer up to $5,000 and are expected to be used to consolidate high-interest debt, such as credit card debt. The loans come with terms of three years and APRs between 26% and 36%. In June, ZestFinance partnered with the massive Chinese online merchant JD.com, formerly 360Buy, to provide credit to consumers.

The company also licenses its platform to help lenders “yield solid risk-rated credit stores.”

ZestFinance was founded in by 2009 Douglas Merrill, a former Google CIO. Where traditional scoring methods might use 25 to 50 data inputs, ZestFinance uses “all the data, and radically different math,” Merrill told Bank Innovation.

“Near-prime is a pretty interesting space, and very unstable,” Merrill said. “It is often difficult for them to secure traditional credit.”

He calls the space “unstable” because many near-prime borrowers are “visitors,” not long-term tenants, and are headed up or down the credit scale. “The trick in underwriting is to recognize which people are going in which direction,” he said. “Basix will identify good risks and make them fair and transparent loans.”

A common example is people with health problems, according to Merrill. Even when insurance covers the cost of care, co-pays can come to several thousand dollars, and other bills can go unpaid either through inattention or lack of emergency funds.

“It all comes down to math, hard math, that nobody else is doing,” Merril said. “We use the math we built at Google, and we treat all data as credit data.”

ZestFinance has raised $112 million in venture funding to date, according to Crunchbase.

The product list from ZestFinance was updated in this version of the story.