EXCLUSIVE—LendingPoint has formally acquired LoanHero, a move that will allow the balance sheet lender to both expand its customer focus as well as bring new capabilities to the point-of-sale, the companies announced today.

The acquisition will combine LendingPoint’s focus on risk management and credit underwriting with LoanHero’s financing platform, which will allow LendingPoint to further expand its credit offerings for a wider range of consumers, CEO Tom Burnside told Bank Innovation.

“What we were looking for was to expand our acquisition channel to move up in credit,” Burnside said of the deal. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed to Bank Innovation. “The [LoanHero] platform is fully integrated; it’s working on Salesforce so it’s just connecting the APIs.”

LendingPoint, which was founded in 2014, currently focuses on offering credit to consumers in the 600-to-700 FICO score category; its acquisition of LoanHero, also founded in 2014, will enable the company to broaden that focus to include customers between the 450-to-850 range, Burnside said.

LendingPoint currently offers loans between $2,000 and $26,500 (with terms from 24 to 48 months). Aside from broadening LendingPoint’s credit customer base, the LoanHero acquisition will expand these consumer loan interactions, which take place fully online, to more physical interactions at the point-of-sale.

While the company was unable to give the number of merchants that are currently using the LoanHero platform, “hundreds of merchants use the LoanHero platform across industries including medical, dental, home improvement, and many others,” according to today’s press release.

“We see these as two separate verticals: one is an enterprise solution for the merchant—it’s a merchant-facing platform,” Burnside said, adding that there will be “some overlap on our back-end services.

The addition of LoanHero’s platform — which focuses on acquiring customers via physical channels, such as a medical office, according to the companies — will allow LendingPoint to open new credit capabilities to this new, wider range of customers, Burnside said.

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