SoFi

If you think about the U.S. fintech scene’s race to super app-dom like a March Madness bracket, SoFi is the odds-on favorite to come out of the “lending” region and go head-to-head with the powerhouses from banking, investing or payment processing backgrounds. But SoFi’s ascent to Wall Street darling status required the steady hand of CEO Anthony Noto to steer the company through the aftermath of its trainwreck 2017 after the company’s frat-like culture came under heavy scrutiny, leading to the ouster of CEO and co-founder Mike Cagney. Every company vying to own the super app market is looking to expand buy-in beyond its original customer base, but Noto’s commitment to SoFi’s flywheel model of cross-selling products to members has paid dividends. But can the company continue its success by expanding its other services?

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Rocket

When not making award-winning Super Bowl ads , Rocket has been reinventing itself as a fintech platform, betting that the lending expertise the company has built over the last 35 years can translate beyond mortgage origination success . Rocket, which may be more familiar to some people as Quicken , became the country’s largest mortgage lender in 2018 and hasn’t given up its lead, amassing a 9% market share . That said, the company has endured a tough last 12 months, with its valuation falling more than 40%. Will Rocket’s strategy of doubling down on lending help right the ship as competitors look to other areas of fintech?

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Upstart

While SoFi has famously targeted HENRY (high earner, not rich yet) clientele , Upstart has cast a wider net in its approach to personal loans, focusing on the broad array of consumers underserved by traditional credit products as opposed to just high earners. Founded by former Google executive Dave Girouard in 2012, Upstart sits somewhere between a loan marketer and a lender itself, leveraging AI to offer higher approval rates and lower APRs, providing instant loan approvals 67% of the time . With aggressive scaling in the cards, can Upstart continue its growth trends?

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Divvy Homes

Divvy Homes has found some investors with deep pockets in order to serve a clientele that lacks them. Founded in 2017, Divvy took advantage of the rent-to-own model and upended the traditional lending process by serving as the lender for those who can’t get a conventional mortgage . Divvy’s users select any home they want , put down 2% of the home’s value, and Divvy foots the rest of the bill. Customers build equity each month over the course of three years through payments to Divvy, and can exercise the option to purchase the home themselves, which they have done 47% of the time , a rate the company says is far above that of its competitors. Can the company make the model stick and continue its expansion into new markets?

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LendingClub

LendingClub is a good reminder that high-flying fintech companies with next-big-thing business models will eventually need to make a consistent profit. The company was one of the first to give loans to a new category of sub-prime users, benefiting from a lack of brick-and-mortar expenses, an easy-to-use interface that made it attractive for consumers and a peer-to-peer lending model that meant the company didn’t need to hold capital reserves. But ever since its highly anticipated 2014 IPO that heralded the company as more tech and less consumer finance , LendingClub has failed to live up to the hype. Can the company now find its footing the way SoFi has?

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Better.com

Better.com CEO Vishal Garg has taught the world that running LinkedIn’s top-rated startup and raising $750 million dollars in your latest fundraising round doesn’t necessarily make you popular. But after firing 900 workers over a Zoom call like it was just another workday and being forced to take a leave of absence, tech’s Most Ridiculed CEO of December 2021 is back at the helm , with a goal of expanding the company beyond its online mortgage business into a one-stop-shop for all things home finance. To do that, the company will be relying on its Tinman workflow engine , a supervised machine-learning network for consumer finance that plays a role across a number of the company’s underwriting products and allows for quick scaling through automation. That nimbleness is becoming increasingly important as the company dips into its several-hundred-million dollar war chest to expand into student loans, personal loans and life insurance. The company nearly tripled revenue year-over-year in the first half of 2021 to $679 million, but the company lost $86 million in the quarter ending in September 2021, the most recent quarter for which data is available. Of course the road ahead for Better.com may be as much about talent as it is about leveraging its technology to enter new markets, and recruiting could prove difficult as long as firsthand accounts of Garg’s layoffs continue to make the rounds in Silicon Valley. A slew of executives have left the company in recent weeks amid bad morale, including the company’s VP of finance, head of sales and head of real estate, potentially indicating a rough road ahead for the real estate newcomer. And f urther headcount cuts could be on the way.

Ribbon

Buying and selling a home are the biggest financial decisions most people make in their lifetimes. Ribbon is aiming to ease everyone’s anxiety during the process by giving sellers a cash guarantee during the period when buyers secure a mortgage, ultimately shortening the timeline for the transaction. For the seller, that means less time worrying about the buyer’s mortgage financing; for the buyer, it provides more time to compare rates among lenders for the price of 1% of the transaction . While Ribbon raising $713 million on just a $500 million valuation may seem out of proportion, the company needs liquidity to offer its cash guarantees on an ever-larger set of homes across the country, especially at a time when the housing market has been crazier than ever. That careful balance means that, as a “power buyer,” Ribbon sits on a razor’s edge : If the market slows, its holdings no longer appreciate in a way that benefits the company’s margins. But if Ribbon can pull off the mission of letting both parties move faster with home closings, the company could effectively, as CEO Shaival Shah puts it , “create a liquid market” from one that is illiquid right now.

Zopa

Like many of its peers, Zopa wanted to offer it all: loans, credit cards, bank accounts and more, and the company seemed poised to do it. But in the last few years, it has changed its tune from being a jack of all trades to a master of just a few, at least for now. After making a name for itself as the dominant force in peer-to-peer lending in the United Kingdom, Zopa hit a rocky patch in 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns decreased its lending volume and the company nearly lost its provisional U.K. banking license — but its prospects looked more solid once its license was secured by the end of that year. The company’s pivot to credit cards and banking services has brought in more than 500,000 customers and it has since shuttered its long-established peer-to-peer lending service earlier this year after facilitating more than £6 billion in loans. But the company hasn’t exited the lending space completely, just removed itself from the thorny regulatory world of P2P: It still offers personal and car loans backed by assets from its banking division, giving the company “a diversity of funding source sources,” according to CEO Jaidev Janardana.

For now, Zopa’s smaller focus on small personal loans and car loans in the lending space helps it center on what matters for its consumers rather than handling the overhead required to facilitate peer-to-peer loans — increasingly important for a company that is said to be in a pre-IPO stage . With its slimmed-down focus, Zopa expected in October 2021 to double its 2022 run rate to $233 million and was hoping to achieve profitability by the end of last year, though it has not publicly stated whether it achieved that goal or not.

Oportun

Low- and moderate-income families spend an estimated $127 billion on interest and fees for short-term loans, and Oportun sees plenty of opportunity in other companies’ margins . Using its A.I.-powered loan application and approval process, the company — which began as an outlet for Latino immigrants to build credit — aims to lower as many costs as possible to undercut competitors’ rates in the space for a wide group of consumers. The company has disbursed $10.5 billion in loans since 2005, and is following the playbook of many of its competitors by expanding out from its core personal loan product into banking. The company’s acquisition of challenger bank Digit in November and a partnership with buy now pay later heavyweight Sezzle to finance big ticket purchases together have shown that Oportun wants to be a super app eventually. But it has struggled through the pandemic, in part because of its litigious practices that caught the attention of the CFPB . Despite the company’s profitability and aggressive acquisition and partnership strategy, Oportun is now worth just $492 million — around half of its 2015 private valuation — with the federal probe still looming.

Enova

Since breaking apart from pawn shop operator Cash America in 2014 , Enova has continued to focus on non-prime consumers and businesses, targeting the riskiest segment of consumers through a wide network of brands, including CashNetUSA, NetCredit and Simplic. This differs from its competitors who have mainly stuck to unified branding across their loan options, and while the business has been profitable through the pandemic , the high-interest lending model itself has come under increased scrutiny, and could be the subject of further regulatory oversight . In the meantime, Enova has set itself apart by expanding internationally to Brazil, and establishing a fast-growing small-business loan segment , which now accounts for more than half of the company’s products. Enova is another lender that is the subject of a CFPB probe , though the probe was opened due to self-reported issues which are, at the moment, unspecified. The company grew its revenue by 11% to $1.2 billion in 2021, though increased spending on marketing and technology brought down net income to $256 million in 2021 from $378 million a year earlier.