Peter Renton

I believe that cash flow underwriting is the greatest innovation in lending in the last decade. And I don't say that lightly. But here's the thing that keeps bugging me: if cash flow underwriting is so great (and it is), why isn't everyone using it already?

The AI revolution in banking isn’t coming, it’s here. But if you talk to the AI companies actually selling into financial institutions, you will discover that widespread adoption is moving slower than the headlines suggest. Not because the technology doesn’t work, and certainly not because banks don’t need it. The roadblocks are more nuanced, more human, and more organizational than you might expect. Over the past week, I sat down with five AI company founders who are deep in the […]

The first wave of fintech in small business lending brought real innovation. Not only could we apply for loans online for the first time, but the approval decisions were very quick, sometimes even instant. By the mid-2010s, companies like Kabbage, Square, and OnDeck had broken new ground, and small businesses had access to capital like never before. Since then, though, we have had a decade of incremental progress. But now the tools seem to be in place for new breakthroughs. […]

Your early delinquency rates are ticking up. Your quarterly vintage reports show deterioration. The ground is shaking, but you don’t know where the earthquake is coming from. Is it the economy? Your underwriting? That new marketing channel you launched? The honest answer: you probably can’t tell. And that could be costing you millions. I’ve spent the past several weeks talking with some of the sharpest minds in credit risk, people who predicted the 2008 crisis two years early and navigated […]

The credit building industry is hot right now. Pick any fintech conference and you'll find half a dozen new products promising to help consumers build credit faster, easier, and with less risk than ever before. But here's the uncomfortable question everyone's dancing around: are these products actually teaching people how to use credit, or are they just manufacturing scores?

Last week, I spent three days in Las Vegas attending Fintech Meetup and it was an epic show. Most of my time was consumed by the Lending Track, because I organized it, but I also caught some of the keynotes, did a breakfast Table Talk, and, of course, had plenty of one-on-one meetings.

For the past three months, the financial press has been writing about private credit as though the apocalypse is imminent. Redemption gates, illiquid assets, SaaS exposure, shadow banking lurking just outside the regulatory perimeter. If you’ve been following the coverage, you might think the entire $1.7 trillion industry is on the verge of collapse. It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening, and getting those two things straight is the whole point of this article. I spent the past […]

The top 100 private fintech companies in the world are now worth $1.9 trillion, nearly three times the combined market cap of the 100 largest public fintechs founded in the last twenty years. They generate about 10% more revenue, too. That’s the headline finding from a new report jointly produced by Blue Dot Investors and FT Partners, and it should make every fintech founder, investor, and board member rethink what “winning” looks like. For most of the last decade, the […]