Community and regional banks have long played a unique role in the overall banking infrastructure across the United States. Although they can’t compete on size or scale against legacy national banks, they can outperform on other fronts.
For instance, community banks often have more flexible lending criteria for small business and agricultural loans. Meanwhile, the ability to forge direct personal relationships with local customers means that they can assess the risk of loans against different criteria. A loan application that gets rejected automatically by a screening tool at a large bank could be approved at a community bank where a human is able to personally assess the viability of the business case.
As a result, community banks fund over 60% of small business loans and over 80% of agricultural loans, which according to the ICBA represents a total of $4.1 trillion in consumer, small business and agricultural loans.
At the same time, one of the downsides is that community banks can have fewer resources to invest in software innovations that require a large upfront investment. In today’s digital age, where customers have come to expect slick, online banking experiences with rapid service delivery, outdated tools and systems could put these important providers at a disadvantage.
To address these challenges Jifiti, a leading lending technology provider, and Peach Finance, a modern loan management and servicing platform, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver a fully integrated, end-to-end lending solution tailored for community and regional banks across the United States.
Helping community and regional banks modernize
Community and regional banks help to foster growth in local businesses and communities through the loans they approve for their customers. The new partnership between Jifiti and Peach Finance is helping to maintain this ability to provide credit thanks to their modern digital infrastructure.
The partnership combines Jifiti’s embedded lending, automated onboarding and digital loan origination capabilities with Peach’s API-first servicing infrastructure.
As a result, these financial institutions can better deploy modern lending programs with speed while maintaining full control over the customer experience, compliance, and lifecycle operations.
“This partnership reflects how modern lending infrastructure should be built – modular, API-driven, and designed for the full lifecycle,” said Eddie Oistacher, CEO at Peach Finance.
“Together with Jifiti, we’re enabling banks to launch faster, operate more efficiently, and scale with confidence,” added the executive.
“Banks today need to move quickly to give customers the financing experience they’ve come to expect – instant access at their moment of need, digital experiences, automated repayments,” commented Yaacov Martin, CEO at Jifiti.
“Our partnership with Peach Finance enables us to deliver a compliant, end-to-end solution – combining intelligent origination with a powerful servicing backbone.”
A modular, white-label solution for community credit
Although Jifiti counts community banks as one of its most important client segments, the company also works with top-tier banks and enterprise brands like Mastercard, Barclays, CaixaBank, Credit Agricole and IKEA.
The partnership with Peach Finance makes it even more straightforward for community and regional banks to access the leading white-label, modular platform.
Meanwhile, Peach Finance serves as the system of record for servicing, managing the loan lifecycle from booking through repayment, reporting, and compliance.
This is thanks to a highly configurable architecture, including ledger, payments, compliance, and customer servicing tools that manage.
This complementary set of capabilities enables a modular but unified system that allows community and regional banks to access the best-in-class technology they need to remain competitive and keep customers satisfied.
