Meet the new mascot “Blockchain,” a puppet that Figure Technologies has created for their video ads aiming at the masses who should consider the benefits of HELOCs on the Blockchain.
View the video ad campaign here.
Figure Technologies is a 2year old San Francisco-based startup that is well funded and focused on changing the entire life-cycle of Loans and beyond. From loan origination to servicing, and securitization. They started servicing the needs of homeowners who have most of their wealth locked in their homes with the so-called HELOCs (Home Equity Line Credit).
The technology they have built is slowly and methodically, being piloted and used in different use cases.
Figure Technologies is eating its own dogfood. Crunchbase reports an eye-popping total funding amount of $1.2billion. This includes a credit facility of $1billion from investment bank Jefferies and WSFS Financial Corporation, the parent of WSFS Bank. This financing facility (May 2019) is custodied and serviced on the in-house Blockchain that Figure Technologies has developed, called Provenance Blockchain.
In the summer of 2019, Figure Technologies launched its $20 million Reg D security token offering, the HASH token, also using the Provenance Blockchain.
Figure Technologies is cofounded by Mike Cagney, the founder, and ex-CEO of Sofi, with his wife June Ou (ex- CTO at Sofi). Undoubtedly, Figure Technologies is targeting the same market that Sofi targeted (refinancing debt). It can be seen as the Blockchain competitor or it can be seen as the technology company that will make it easy for Sofi to migrate to a blockchain infrastructure when the time is right.
Current product offering of Figure Technologies
Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer – No.3 influencer in the finance sector by Refinitiv Global Social Media 2019.
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On the other hand, the target market is huge and maybe the two companies stay separate as Sofi grows its platform beyond refinancing loans and into wealth management.
Figure Technologies presents a huge global opportunity in private markets. They estimate savings via their Provenance blockchain (Provenance benefit figure) and revenues on the Provenance blockchain (Provenance Opportunity figure)
Provenance Blockchain
The in house blockchain is public but permissioned. The participants are: The members that transact on the Provenance blockchain (which include the HASH token holders), the Node hosts, the administrator, and the omnibus banks that take care of the fiat bridges to the Provenance blockchain.
The consensus model is from Hyperledger. More details in the Provenance white paper.
HASH token
A great example of a hybrid token that would not be possible in the current financial infrastructure. HASH has equity like attributes and voting rights.
HASH token holders receive directly (digitally) fees from the members that transact on the Provenance blockchain (are you salivating while looking at the Provenance Opportunity figures?).
They also vote for the administrator.
Also HASH has staking functionality for the nodes. Each node has to put up a stake of HASH on which they will earn the return for their services.
Details regarding the allocations and the economics are found the Provenance white paper.
