By enabling market participants to share information without divulging competitive data, financial technology provider Spring Labs announced today that its novel network between market participants has facilitated substantial reductions in a key fraud type in the consumer loan segment known as Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loans.
Read More: Ondot’s Card Management Platform Now Offers Digital Issuance Capability
By allowing a lender to learn from other lenders if they’re in the process of approving a loan to the same borrower—but with all sides maintaining strict confidentiality about their loan activity, and Spring Labs itself having no access to the underlying data—lenders on the Spring platform are able to stop a fraud known as lien stacking, which is where one borrower is simultaneously approved for loans from multiple lenders.
“This is a great example of how technology is enabling the future of secure data exchange in financial services,” said Adam Jiwan, co-founder and CEO of Spring Labs. “By allowing market participants to share sensitive information securely and anonymously, our system enables otherwise competitive companies to work together to achieve common goals, such as reducing fraud.”
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with RJ Horsley, President of SpotOn Transact, Inc
The residential PACE loan industry, which currently operates in California, Florida, and Missouri, has funded over $6b of cumulative loans and an annual loan volume of $1b. PACE loans are used for clean energy upgrades such as solar panels and high-efficiency HVAC systems, and the loans are then repaid via property tax bills.
The Spring Labs’ network technology is built on modern cryptography, which allows the visibility of information shared by network participants to be strictly controlled, and a permissioned blockchain, which provides a time-stamped, immutable record and audit trail to all network participants. This combination of data opacity and transaction transparency is a key to resolving the age-old problem of information sharing among competitors.
Read More: The Future of Cyber Insurance: Flexibility, Transparency & Specialization
