Finitive Launches Alternative Lending Investment Platform

Finitive, which brings capital from institutional investors to alternative lending companies, announced earlier this month that it received capital commitments totaling $1.3 billion. It also officially launched its financial technology platform.

According to founder and Executive Chairman Jon Barlow, the company, which was founded last August, has two kinds of clients: institutional investors and alternative lending companies. So far, the company has four alternative lender clients.

“We are very selective [with our lending clients],” Barlow said. “We are not a list service.”

Among these four lenders, Barlow told AltFinanceDaily that $1 billion has been committed from institutional investors and $250 to $300 million has actually been funded. Finitive gets paid by its lender clients based on how much money gets funded of the capital they provide from institutional investors. Finitive does not charge its institutional investor clients.

“We perform due diligence for [institutional investors] so that they don’t have to, and we give them our due diligence files for free,” Barlow said. “We don’t think anyone has ever done this. We think it’s revolutionary.”

Through the Finitive platform, institutional investors, along with banks, insurance companies and fund managers can directly access proprietary, alternative lending transactions that are vetted by a team of highly trained credit professionals, Barlow said.  For the lending companies, or “originator partners,” the platform allows them to raise capital from a variety of sources.

“We are unique for the institutional investor community because we show [institutional investors] highly vetted transactions,” Barlow said.

Barlow estimates that it takes roughly 500 hours and several hundred thousand dollars to perform proper institutional due diligence on an alternative lending transaction, and Finitive does this for free for investors. So this also benefits participating lenders that now have access to more funds. Finitive is based in New York and has 11 full-time employees.

Todd Stone was a reporter for AltFinanceDaily.