Ascent secures venture funding to modernize underwriting infrastructure and deliver financial portability

Company exits stealth with initial live clients and $5.3M in funding.

Ascent Platform Corporation, the leader in financial portability solutions for banks and credit unions, announced today that it has successfully raised $5.3 million in venture funding. The round was led by Foundation Capital, Trustage, Alloy Labs, Reseda Group, and other investors.

As open banking takes hold in the US, community banks and credit unions will need new tools to compete and win. Ascent is the first platform that enables financial institutions and their customers to securely and bidirectionally share internal and external financial information, on a permissioned basis. The platform positions banks and credit unions to act as trusted partners in helping consumers and small businesses navigate the financial marketplace by giving them control over when and how they share information.

Financial institutions sit on troves of data on their customers, but this data is largely unstructured, siloed, and inoperable. Ascent merges external 3rd party data with an institution's data to provide a holistic view of the customer, surface insights about them, and deliver higher levels of personalization and service. By orchestrating data end-end across internal and external data sources, institutions can automate queries, analyses, and models that drive underwriting workflows across originations, monitoring, portfolio management, and compliance. The end result is a 360-view of the customer across the institution. The platform enables customers to securely share information with other entities–not just financial institutions, but insurers, healthcare providers, logistics and supply chain partners, government, etc.

“Open banking will likely create dynamics similar to the Telecommunications Reform Act and HIPAA, where service and information portability increased market complexity and competition. With switching costs and barriers lowered, financial institutions will need to find new ways to create value,” said Elizabeth McCluskey, Head of Discovery Fund and Director at TruStage Ventures. “Ascent is positioned to capitalize on increased data accessibility in financial services, and manage and control workflows within and across institutions”.

Ascent is extensible and augments institutions' existing technology. To help banks and credit unions launch and gain immediate value from Ascent, the company also built a set of add-on modules that unlock value from loan origination and servicing systems. These modules centralize loan operations and seamlessly orchestrate the flow of borrower data across systems, increasing the capacity of teams to focus on core business drivers. Deployment is white-glove with no engineering required and minimal IT involvement.

"Mid-size financial institutions struggle to compete with larger banks, particularly in the current environment," said Angus Davis, General Partner at Foundation Capital. “We invested in Ascent because the company's technology makes it easy for credit unions and regional banks to digitize lending workflows without a costly rip-and-replace of existing systems."

“Our investors include some of the biggest and most innovative CUSOs, tech-forward banks, and fintech-focused VCs,” said Arjun Sahgal, co-founder and CEO of Ascent. “We are grateful for their strategic guidance and support, as we grow our network of clients and partners who are equally committed to enhancing the competitiveness of community banks and credit unions.”

About Ascent Platform

Ascent is the next-generation platform that provides lenders with the ability to streamline any and all product applications and forms without disrupting existing systems and processes. Ascent replaces the patchwork of full-stack product applications, static web forms, and PDFs with intelligent applications and forms featuring prefilled data, optional prescreening rules and logic, and collaborative document collection. Most important, the platform learns from every interaction, and uses those learnings to make subsequent experiences more contextual, with fewer questions for the customer and less work for the lender. Using a no-code builder, institutions can rapidly configure and deploy beautiful bespoke applications and forms at their own pace. For more information, please visit ascentplatform.io.