The speed at which financial institutions are expected to meet changing customer demands drove Chicago-based fintech Amount and TD Bank into a strategic partnership that will have the bank using Amount’s platform to make personal loans.

In addition to smoothing out the customer journey by using Amount, the fintech will also allow the bank to get better credit data, faster, Bank Innovation has learned.

Mark Victoria, head of personal lending at TD Bank, said that the bank has faced a growing consumer demand for seamless digital and mobile experiences. He said the bank, therefore, prioritized finding a platform that could provide a simple, straightforward customer experience in personal lending.

In the first quarter of 2018, personal loan outstandings increased to a record $120 billion, an 18% year-over-year increase, according to TransUnion. TransUnion said fintech companies originated 36% of total personal loans in 2017 compared with less than 1% in 2010.

The TD Bank-Amount partnership was announced on March 25.

The bank originally enlisted Amount to power its TD Fit Loan debt consolidation product, which launched in 2018. Select TD Bank customers can apply for a Fit Loan unsecured installment loan of up to $35,000, online or through a mobile device. Approved customers can receive funds as soon as the next day.

The extended partnership will allow TD Bank to tap into more of Amount’s suite of tools, which includes credit decisioning, fraud prevention, account verification, CRM and other technologies. Amount’s technology is also giving TD Bank a clearer picture of the data its interactions with customers are generating, Victoria said.

“We get data realtime, and we get more data, faster,” he said. “The way the platform is configured, it allows us to execute change much faster than we could on legacy systems or legacy bank platforms. So, not only we are getting more data, faster, but then we can also execute on that data to approve as many consumers as we can, to prevent fraud on as many consumers as we can, and to grow the organization and grow the business further.”

Al Goldstein, founder and CEO of Amount, told Bank Innovation that his company especially wants to expand the capabilities of its products that face individual consumers and small businesses and to support not just personal loans, but unsecured loans, secured loans, credit cards, point-of-sale, transaction, and other types of credit.

“The goal is really to create off-the-shelf products that are part of this enterprise offering that we have that include fraud and verification, which is really important in the digital world,” he said. “It’s to support using the most advanced analytics, machine learning and AI in decisioning, when you’re dealing with credit and risk, and it’s to support the servicing process.”

Victoria said the bank is currently looking at “all the above,” but that he would not elaborate.

Goldstein said his company’s lending platform is built to help banks in “enabling the ‘Amazon experience’ for consumers in financial services.”

“The idea that when you apply for a loan, as opposed to everything else you do in your daily life, that you would have to wait a week or two weeks, and you have to send paper documentation back and forth, is just foreign,” Goldstein said. “And especially to the younger generation.”

Amount has originated nearly $6 billion in loans for more than 800,000 consumers, which works out to an average of about $7,500 per loan.

TD Bank, one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S., with more than 9 million customers, has a market cap of $101.3 billion.