A new startup is looking to innovate in a space that has largely been bypassed by FinTech: mortgages.
There has been a great deal of action in the alternative lending space, but outside of student-loan specialist SoFi, most startups have stayed away from home loans. New entrant Coinshark.io is bringing a FinTech focus to mortgage lending.
Coinshark.io has a simple premise: Pay your mortgage in bitcoin. Coinshark will only accept bitcoin for payments, it says, so no switching back to dollars when the next craze hits. Bitcoin has been fairly steady in its valuation recently, but it likely won’t matter, since mortgage loans will still be written in dollars until a bitcoin-based bank opens for business.
Here’s the last three months of bitcoin’s value versus the dollar, courtesy of CoinDesk:
Here’s how Coinshark explains it:
Bitcoin enthusiasts having been longing for the day when they can pay for all of their living expenses in Bitcoin. A housing payment is often the largest financial expense in a homeowner’s budget. It can be done with mitigated risk to the note holders, especially with new Bitcoin-based equities hitting Wall Street as we speak. The time is now for mortgages payable in Bitcoin.
The trend lately in FinTech circles has been to talk down Bitcoin’s utility as a currency and to praise the potential of the blockchain instead. Coinshark bucks that trend, but if payments are written to the blockchain, well, there’s more public information for scoring borrowers.
There is no indication of why this service would be limited to paying mortgages rather than, well, anything at all, but there must be a reason the team set its sights on this, as they say, the largest expense in the typical homeowner’s budget.
A sign of strength for the mortgage industry is a new online-only lender called BIGfreedom, which bills itself as Uber for mortgages and is a subsidiary of Freedom Mortgage. BIGfreedom is looking to hire 75 or more employees for its Columbia, Md. facility. Freedom already employs 2,700. At the same time, bank loan officers are reportedly heading to brokerages, where they are able to offer a wider array of products.
More startups would also be a sign of more perceived opportunity in the space.