The ABA survey was conducted to review the digital lending landscape, specifically to gauge member interest in two different types of business models:

• Technology partnership—Implementing digital lending technologies to offer a digital customer experience to originate, underwrite to bank guidelines, and close small business and consumer loans.
• Referral model—Refer customers that fall outside of the bank’s lending guidelines, either for credit reasons or infrastructure limitations, to an online lender and receive referral fees.

The survey drew responses from nearly 200 banks, most (74 percent) were community banks with assets of under $1 billion. The loan types these banks offered, as a percentage of total loan origination volume, were split among consumer loans (11 percent), small business loans (22 percent), commercial loans (37 percent) and mortgages (37 percent). The figures were much the same for banks with assets over $1 billion. A vast majority of all banks included in our survey offered unsecured personal loans (83 percent), home improvement loans (88 percent) and automobile loans (88 percent), with just a small percentage (7 percent) offering student loans.

Of those who did not offer consumer and small business loans, there was interest in expanding into those loan categories if they had technology that would enable them to competitively make these loans. And fully 83 percent of banks surveyed intend to slowly or moderately grow their business lending (loans from $3M–$100M) in the next two years.