Trade Upstart Holdings, Inc. - UPST CFD

Upstart Holdings Inc (UPST) is a cloud-based artificial intelligence lending platform. 

Dave Girouard, former president of enterprise at Google; Anna Counselman, former manager of global enterprise customer programs and gmail consumer operations at Google; and Paul Gu, a Thiel Fellow, founded Upstart in April 2012.

Upstart became a public company and began trading on the Nasdaq on 16 December 2020 under the symbol UPST.

The San Mateo, California-based company partners with small to large banks and credit unions to provide consumer loans. 

The platform assesses creditworthiness based on non-traditional factors such as education and work. Using machine learning models, the platform can more precisely identify risks and approve more applicants than traditional, credit-score based lending models. 

The company’s models had more than 1,600 variables by the end of 2021, compared to just 23 in 2014. They have been trained on more than nine million repayment events. 

The company's platform gathers consumer loan demand and links it to its Upstart AI (artificial intelligence)-enabled bank partners. Customers can choose from a variety of offers provided by the company’s bank partners. They are typically offered unsecured and secured personal and auto loans ranging in size from $1,000 to $50,000.

The loans typically carry an annual rate of 6.5% to 35.99%, with terms ranging from three to seven years, with a monthly repayment schedule and no prepayment penalty.

On the other hand, bank partners can also offer Upstart-powered loans through a bank-branded interface on their own website or mobile application. 

By the end of 2021, the company had 38 bank partners and about 69% of its loans were approved and fully automated.

In March 2021, the company announced it acquired Prodigy Software, Inc., a provider of cloud-based automotive retail software. Seven months later, the company launched the auto loans service Upstart Auto Retail software. As of 31 December 2021, the company had 5,800 auto loans and more that 400 dealer locations have adopted the company’s auto software.