Launch HN: Pier (YC W23) – Stripe for Credit
Hey HN! Alex & Jess here, cofounders at Pier (https://www.pier-finance.com). Pier is an API for launching credit products. We enable any company to offer credit by handling origination, underwriting, compliance and servicing with just a few lines of code.

There’s no ‘try it out’ link, primarily because (as most fintech devs know) there are compliance and regulatory thresholds that make it hard for us to give out sandbox keys freely. However, we’ve put together this video to show you the basics of how Pier works: https://www.loom.com/share/04883eb17f394b46a67cce919cb77356.

Alex & I worked together at our last company, a credit tech startup, where we saw how businesses struggle to launch credit products quickly & compliantly, due to fragmented solutions and high compliance hurdles. We’ve talked to many companies looking to launch their own product, and are taking our learnings from before to build a modular, flexible credit stack.

Credit is highly complex and requires a dedicated team -—and few people specialize in this. Unlike social apps where you can launch with a 70% product and iterate over time, credit is heavily regulated and needs to be done 100% right from the beginning. When you factor this in with federal and state regulations across 50 states, the tech stack and compliance hurdles become too time-consuming and expensive for companies to build in-house, especially for fast-moving teams trying to build innovative products. We’re talking 9-12 months of buildout and millions of dollars. This is what most companies struggle with and it’s why we’re valuable to them.

Our credit infrastructure gives developers the freedom of not having to worry about the details of managing a credit program. Using Pier, they can offer credit to their users without ever directing them outside their app. Our API powers it all under the hood (see API docs: https://pier-dev.readme.io)

For example, a business (say "ACME") has a user who comes to their platform & applies for a loan. That user stays on ACME’s platform and is never redirected to a 3rd party. ACME owns the entire UX from presenting loan offer, to signing loan docs, to disbursing funds, sending statements and collecting payments. What ACME doesn’t have to deal with is any of the back end. Each part of this flow is powered by Pier API.

We support the full credit lifecycle from loan origination to loan servicing. Want to generate a loan doc for a specific credit offer & user? We've an endpoint that creates a pdf to present to the user, and ensures it doesn’t violate any laws for the state the user is in. Want to retrieve loan balance, generate loan statement or process loan payment? We've API endpoints for that too.

There're existing products that solve parts of the credit stack, such as KYC & underwriting, but nothing that solves the credit stack end-to-end. Credit is different from payments and banking-—those are 1x activities, while loan terms are for 12 months or more. We see “credit” as a living-and-breathing creature that evolves throughout each loan’s life cycle due to a variety of behaviors, hence requires an end-to-end solution to properly address.

Since launching a few months ago, we’ve onboarded several customers and have live loan traffic on our platform. Our existing customers use Pier to provide a wide variety of credit products to their users, including BNPL for wedding, credit builder, BNPL for clean energy, salary advance loans, portfolio line of credit, etc.

Pricing - Monthly min Saas fee ($7-20k/mth), and a usage fee of 0.2-1.0% of loan volume for origination and servicing. This largely depends on the credit program and loan volume.

We’re building devtools to enable the next-gen of credit products, with our goal to make credit more accessible to everyone! We’re super eager to get your feedback — What’s your experience building in fintech/credit? What can we do to make this better? Anything else that comes to mind? Thank you!