
Beforepay, a fintech specialising in ‘pay advance’ services, has announced the launch of a dedicated business-to-business offshoot that will sell its in-house-developed platforms and AI-powered tools to fellow lenders and lendtechs.
Touted by Beforepay as its dedicated “artificial intelligence and enterprise-software division”, the new division has been set up to provide the group’s AI-powered loan decisioning systems and “high-volume, high-efficiency” lending platforms to business customers.
The rollout of its new B2B offering, christened ‘Carrington Labs’ (taking its name from the Sydney CBD street in which the firm is headquartered), effectively commercialises Beforepay’s risk-management solutions, proprietary models, and lending platform that power the fintech’s operations.
Carrington Labs will initially bring two Beforepay products to market: its AI-powered decision engine and an end-to-end loan origination and servicing platform.
The first “brings together in one wrapper” Beforepay’s AI-powered risk-management modules that promise users “quick, accurate lending decisions in a fully automated, low-cost manner”.
Among the platform’s features include:
- An AI-powered pay cycle detection and prediction engine for income verification and repayment scheduling;
- Alternative data ingestion and pre-processing, enabling the categorisation of transactions and preparation of data for training and inference;
- AI-powered risk assessments – noted by Beforepay as the “centrepiece of this solution”. The tool can assess 50,000 individual variables to select the 400-500 most predictive variables that could impact a borrower’s financial stability and creditworthiness, including behavioural, financial, and other factors, using gradient-boosting algorithms;
- An A/B testing engine to estimate customers’ default elasticity; and
- A repayment scheduling and debiting engine able to create “an individual, optimised schedule for customer repayments”.
The second product on offer will be the next generation of Beforepay’s end-to-end loan origination and servicing platform. Beforepay boasts that the platform is the “next iteration of [its] highly automated, highly efficient lending platform”.
According to Beforepay, the platform to date has enabled the issuance of more than four million loans since inception, and the origination of an average of 35,000 loans each week “with a team of fewer than 40 [in-house] employees”.
“This end-to-end solution will aim to support an entirely digital lending journey, expected to enable customers to go from account creation to funds received in as little as five minutes, done entirely through a smartphone app (or optional web interface). It will seek to combine origination, loan management, and an optional front-end experience in an integrated and efficient way.”
Founded in 2019, Beforepay’s flagship pay advance product enables consumers to borrow a portion of an anticipated salary payment ‘on demand’.
The group reported a modest net profit before tax of $2.2 million and revenue of $17.6 million for the first half of the 2024 financial year – a 21 per cent revenue jump on the previous corresponding period.
Beforepay’s loan book, or total pay advances hit $358.6 million for H1 2024, increasing 18 per cent year-on-year.