How Fintech Is Reinventing the Installment Loan

The company has raised a total of $720 million from prominent venture-capital firms like Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Founders Fund, which is run by Peter Thiel, the Trump-backing Facebook director who is a fellow member of what people in Silicon Valley call the PayPal Mafia. For years, retailers like department stores offered wildly below-market interest rates to shoppers who signed up at the cash register for the store-brand credit card. Variations on the model, if in a far less transparent form, can be found when a telecommunications company sells a new phone by tacking on a charge to each month's bill for the life of a wireless contract.