“I believe we’ve reached a crossroads in consumer finance, where things will probably get either much better, or much worse, due to the technological transformation of products, providers, cost structures, business and market models, and infrastructure.”
In many smaller American towns banks and credit unions are finding usual sources of loan demand dwindling — and that was before the COVID-19 recession. Community banking institutions may find trouble if they market their credit services further afield. The solution may be to dig deeper for loans in the communities they already know, marketing loans to be evaluated with new alternative data sources (like some fintechs do).