Progressa, a Vancouver-based financial technology company focused on helping sub-prime and near-prime Canadians seeking to improve their financial health, announced last week it is partnering with Alternative Credit Fund, a Vancouver-based specialty credit fund, to facilitate up to a $13 million forward flow whole loan purchase program to support the company’s growing Point-of-Sale finance business, which is called Progressa Connect. The program comes just a few months after Progressa secured $84 million through its latest equity funding round, which was led by Canaccord Genuity and Gravitas with participation from Eight Capital and Paradigm Capital.
Progressa claims that Progressa Connect is the only publicly available API in Canada for offering non-prime credit, providing connectivity to both Progressa’s proprietary credit score and its core lending business and servicing platform, allowing Point-of-Sale platforms and originators to offer credit solutions to non-prime consumers in a “turnkey” way. While sharing more details about the program, Progressa CFO Kiya Hushyar, CA, stated:
“Coming off the heels of an $84 million debt and equity fundraise, the Company plans to utilize this new facility from the Alternative Credit Fund in tandem with its existing whole loan sale securitization facilities in order to securitize a wider net of monthly receivables and drive down its blended cost of capital.”
Progressa, which was founded in 2013, is on a mission to build a socially responsible consumer finance company that encourages borrowing for the right reasons. The company previously revealed:
“We empower collection agencies to offer proactive solutions and drive healthy recoveries while protecting brand reputation with industry leading NPS and servicing. For point of sale finance we allow platform partners and other originators to expand their merchant offerings to service non-prime consumers and achieve industry leading approval rates.”