Turnkey Lender raises US$2 million in funding

Their total funding closed at US$3.6milion.

Singapore-based fintech startup Turnkey Lender racked up US$2 million in their recent round of funding, which brings their total funding to date at USS$3.6 million.

Established in 2014, Turnkey Lender is cloud-based loan management system that provides end-to-end lending business automation technology to non-bank lenders and small banks: new fintech companies, multifinance companies, microfinance companies, rural banks, and pawnshops, among others.

“Traditionally, lending was done mostly by banks, and the traditional software is designed and priced for banks – it’s heavy, expensive, hard to adjust and designed just for a certain department within a bank,” says Elena Ionenko, co-founder of Turnkey Lender. “We built a cloud platform which automates the entire lending business end-to- end, bringing the same level of automation and credit risk management technology used in banks to smaller players at an affordable price.”

Ionenko shares that while she and co-founder Dmitry Voronenko were working in previous companies and providing solutions for banks, they saw a new wave of online lenders -- mostly former bankers -- who were looking for the advanced credit scoring, decision automation and loan management technology but could not afford the traditional banking software.

“That’s how we came up with the idea of the lean cloud platform, which would combine the best practices of the banking industry, all the most advanced credit scoring and reporting tools with the unlimited flexibility and affordability,” says Ionenko, who has more than 15 years of experience in finance and IT. He has also co-founded two start-up companies.

Turnkey Lender is already in 25 countries, says Ionenko, and they are focusing on Southeast Asia now. They are investing in digital marketing and expanding their sales teams. They also partner with local credit bureaus, which become the company’s sales channels since they help these bureaus sell their reports automatically and expand their customer bases.

Ionenko and Voronenko funded the company initially, after hiring topnotch technical staff with lots of experience in financial technology in Ukraine. “We spent more than one year just developing this solution, since from the very beginning we envisioned total flexibility and scalability of this system, so it’s very complex” says Ionenko. “Then we were bootstrapping for quite some time”

Right now, Ionenko says that Turnkey Lender works with lending organisations but in the future they believe that any SME can offer in-house financing to their customers using their origination and servicing software.