Funding Circle, the U.K.-based peer-to-peer lending platform, hit a $10 billion milestone in loans to small- to medium-sized (SME) businesses on Thursday.

The nine-year-old company plans to continue to develop its “partnership strategy,” Bernard Martinez, U.S. managing director at Funding Circle, told Bank Innovation. In the U.S., the company is “very focused” on partnerships aimed at business borrowers, he added.

The lender integrated the Stripe Partner Program into its platform in January, enabling Stripe users to upload their data to apply for loans up to $500,000. The lender also tacked on Alcentra Group in September 2018. Besides partnerships, the company is looking to expand to Canada and use its data infrastructure to further “streamline” the lending process, according to Martinez.

Despite these expansions, the company logged a £30.8 million ($37.42 million) loss in the first half of 2019, up from a £27.1 million ($32.93 million) loss in the same period last year. Setback aside, Martinez maintained that the company is growing at a healthy clip. “We feel pretty good about how we’re positioning our lending strategy with our investors at the moment,” he said.  

The company currently works with 72,000 SMEs globally and more than 92,000 investors via its platform, approximately 5,000 of which joined so far this year.

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David O’Connell, senior analyst at Aite Group, was more guarded about the company’s performance. “Though it’s terrific and impressive that they went from zero to $10 billion in a relatively short period of time, the growth of their next $10 billion will probably be a little bit slower,” he said.

Online lenders cropped up following the 2008 financial crisis, when banks pulled back from loaning to SMEs. When platforms like Funding Circle emerged, their primary advantage lay in their technologies, but it’s a model that isn’t sustainable in the long run, O’Connell argued. Though banks have been slow to catch up, he believes it’s inevitable that they will over time.

O’Connell predicted that borrowers eventually will lean towards banks, which offer services that online lenders typically don’t, such as cash management services and advisory services. “The waning technological advantage will be kind of a heavy hammer over the next four or five years,” he added.

Furthermore, the online lending model is yet to be tested during a recessionary period. “We should keep our optimism guarded about the sector until they get through one credit cycle,” O’Connell said. “The vast majority of folks that I talk to think we are going to have a recession within, I don’t know, the next year and a half.”