EXCLUSIVE—Speedy, flashy financial service through mobile or a wearable is all well and good, but the product has to respond to changing customer needs as well.
That’s why financial technologies provider Kasasa has come up with a loan product that will allow users to “take back” some of their funds.
“There’s lots of information out there that tells people that they should pay more than what’s owed each month to pay off loans quickly. People know this, but they also know that loans are greedy,” John Waupsh, chief innovation officer for Kasasa, told Bank Innovation. “Once they take it, I can’t get that money back.”
The chief problem with this, as Waupsh noted, is that “life happens”—emergency bills and unforeseen events can quickly turn the extra cash a user paid to their loan into money that can’t be spared. Kasasa Loans, announced by the company last week during its conference, is fixing this with its “take-back” feature.
Once s user has his Kasasa Loan, he can log in and scroll through a transparent visual of his loan, which will show his balance for takebacks.
The user can take whatever they like from that balance, which is determined by the extra cash they have put forward towards their loan, and then put it toward whatever he likes. Since the loans are distributed via that customer’s bank or credit union and not by Kasasa, this new kind of loan will have no effect on a financial institution’s underwriting process.
Additionally, there is no compounded risk to a user’s financial health as takeback balances are treated like a revolving line of credit by the credit bureaus, Waupsh said. Kasasa currently reports customer data to all three major credit bureaus.
“It’s something that consumers always wished could happen, but loans have never been built this way,” Waupsh said. “We built this specifically for consumers to be very confident in their borrowing. We really believe that we’ve defined a new category for loans.”