Experian Teams With Oakbrook to Offer Debt Consolidation Loans

Experian Consumer Services has launched a partnership with non-bank lender Oakbrook.

The collaboration with the British firm, announced Monday (Oct. 7), will offer debt consolidation loans on the Experian Marketplace, using technology from Experian’s recent partnership with affordability software/payments firm Paylink.

“Debt consolidation remains the number one reason customers search for loans with Experian,” the company said in a news release. “However, many customers face challenges in securing a debt consolidation loan due to affordability restrictions.”

To deal with this issue, Expieran last month teamed with Paylink to integrate that company’s “ReFi” solution.

As Experian noted at the time, many people who need debt consolidation loans don’t qualify because of affordability restrictions, leading millions of people to borrow from friends or family, or worse, turn to unlicensed lenders or loan sharks.

According to the release, Oakbrook is the first lender to use this offering, letting customers consolidate their credit commitments, including personal loans and credit cards, into a single debt consolidation loan.

“Oakbrook is committed to simplifying and personalizing borrowing,” Claire Smith, head of marketing at Oakbrook. “This collaboration with Experian and Paylink enables us to bring this vision to life, providing innovative solutions that give customers better access to credit and help them simplify their financial commitments.”

The partnership comes at a time when bigger banks are losing some share to FinTechs in their efforts to attract lower-income households, as PYMNTS wrote last week.

“Digital banks garnered a 47% share of new account openings in the first half of 2023, up from 36% in 2020,” that report said. “Traditional banks’ strategy, to capture some share of new account openings again, rests on building out a physical footprint that has been extant for decades — this time building branches where they’d not been before — opens up the competition for lower-income households on a new front.”

As reported here, the Federal Reserve has charted the rise of “banking deserts” around the country, affecting 12 million people, with brick-and-mortar locations becoming harder to access. These are locations where banks are outside a certain radius: two miles for urban communities, five miles for suburban communities and 10 miles for rural towns.

“The news that JPMorgan would be opening 100 new branches in lower-income areas — chiefly in rural and urban locations — seeks to seed at least some of those deserts,” PYMNTS wrote. “The branches are reportedly also hosting small business and literary workshops.”

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