Peach CEO Eddie Oistacher Joins Fintech One-on-One Podcast
Peach CEO and Co-Founder Eddie Oistacher joined Peter Renton on the Fintech One-on-One podcast to chat about Peach's founding story, the biggest challenges lenders face today, and how Peach helps lenders meet borrowers halfway during a downturn.
They also discussed how Peach's Self-Service Portfolio Migration capability is changing the game for lenders who want to modernize their servicing technology.
An excerpt from the podcast
Peter: I’d like to talk about loan servicing. There’s a lot of talk about a potential recession this year, and the economic environment may end up being quite challenging. How should lenders be thinking about servicing given what may be in store for us this year?
Eddie: Downturns in lending always make for an interesting discussion. At previous companies, we learned a lot about these recessionary periods, gaining insight into how people behave during a recession and what the lenders that survived did differently from those that eventually had to write off entire portfolios.
I think the key for any lender is to keep the borrower financially healthy and happy. Because in the end, these are your loyal customers, and losing them during a downturn probably means losing them forever.
We put so much effort and money into acquiring these customers, so during this kind of economic environment you just need to be flexible enough to weather the period where the customer may experience financial hardship. The required flexibility can take a lot of different forms as you work with your customers to find a solution. One way, for example, can be allowing your customer to make no payments for a certain period of time. Or you can do things like lowering the monthly payment for a given period, refinancing the loan, extending the term, waiving fees, or lowering interest for a while.
So there are multiple different ways for you to help the customer and keep them on your platform without charging them off or writing them off in your books. And that’s where robust and modern technology is key. If the lender doesn’t have all these tools, then they’re likely going to lose the customer forever. Because if the customer can’t pay what the lender is asking, they’ll have no choice but to walk away and either file for bankruptcy or default on the loan.
Peter: Right, got it. On your website, it talks about the Adaptive Core™, which it looks like you’ve trademarked. What is an Adaptive Core™ and why is that important?
Eddie: Our Adaptive Core is our proprietary loan management system, which is the heartbeat of what we do. You can think about it in this way: If you need to make a change to a lending program, the Adaptive Core enables you to change a configuration, instead of changing code or introducing a new feature. It is basically an ability for lenders to quickly and easily launch and modify lending products. And because we support virtually any asset class, it’s very adaptive to your needs and offers a great deal of flexibility.
We have 200+ variables that control the loan behavior without needing a single line of code—not from us and not from the lender...