A customer can want a new kitchen, agree on the cabinets, choose the handles and still leave the contractor with no sale. The awkward moment comes after the price. Can the purchase be financed? In the usual arrangement, that question belongs to a lender with its own appetite for risk. A rejection can send the customer elsewhere, application in hand. Skeps has built a business around changing what happens in those few minutes.
- Skeps connects merchants to multiple financing providers through one platform.
- Its parallel-look approach evaluates financing options simultaneously.
- U.S. Bank Avvance and Momnt joined its partner network in 2026.
The New York fintech sells the machinery behind the financing experience. A merchant can keep its own branding while customers apply for credit through a connected group of financial institutions. For banks, the same infrastructure puts loan products inside someone else’s checkout or sales conversation. The customer sees a way to pay. Skeps manages the connections that make the offer possible.
One application. Several doors.
The useful distinction is between a queue and a comparison. In a waterfall arrangement, an application moves through lenders in sequence. Skeps describes its alternative as parallel-look: one universal application and a single credit pull support simultaneous evaluation across financing options. Instead of making a shopper experience the lender network as a succession of doors, the platform brings the doors together.
That distinction has practical consequences. A contractor wants financing for a project, a patient wants to schedule treatment, and a retailer wants a completed purchase. None has much appetite for rebuilding an application around each institution’s rules. Skeps’s expertise lies in connecting credit decisioning, data and merchant workflows closely enough that the machinery does not become the customer’s problem.
The company’s business offering advertises access to more than 30 lending partners. That is a company-reported network count, not a promise that every applicant will receive 30 offers. Eligibility still depends on the lenders and the program. The appeal is coverage: different credit appetites and products can sit behind one merchant relationship.
The blockchain company that moved toward the till
Skeps began with a narrower proposition. Incorporated in 2018, it initially operated a blockchain marketplace where lenders could exchange consumer leads securely. Early work focused on personal loans for healthcare and home renovation through online credit aggregators. By January 2022, its product had evolved toward white-label buy-now-pay-later infrastructure for banks and fintech lenders.
There is a useful change of emphasis here. A marketplace for leads helps institutions find potential borrowers. A financing platform embedded in a purchase helps them reach people when the need becomes concrete. The product’s evolution moved it closer to the transaction. The evidence supports that shift; it does not establish that the earlier product collapsed.
The founding group consisted of Tushar Srivastava, his brother Prerit and Mayank Tewari. Today Skeps lists Tushar as CEO and Prerit as CTO. Their company takes its name from a skep, a traditional beehive. It is an unusually domestic image for financial infrastructure: separate participants collaborating around a shared outcome.
Its underlying technology uses a private blockchain to coordinate information across participants. Customers do not need to buy cryptocurrency to finance a purchase. The practical product is consumer-credit infrastructure. Calling it a crypto business would tell a merchant rather little about what it can actually do.
A bank needs a route to the buyer
The bank partnerships make that positioning tangible. In 2021, First National Bank of Omaha launched a BNPL offering built with Skeps and EXL. It connected financing to ecommerce sites and physical stores through options including QR codes and text. EXL contributed analytics and servicing capabilities alongside the lending and technology work.
In March 2026, U.S. Bank announced Avvance’s integration with Skeps while introducing six- and seven-year financing terms for larger home improvement purchases. A bank gains distribution through merchants already using the platform. Merchants gain another source of financing without making the bank’s application process a separate destination.
August brought Momnt. Its lending products became available to contractors on Skeps’s platform, widening the financing options they could offer homeowners. Skeps Chief Banking Officer Ruby Walia put the reason plainly:
“No two projects, or customers, look the same.”Ruby Walia, on the Momnt partnership
The business is therefore selling to two connected constituencies: merchants seeking completed sales, and financial institutions seeking suitable borrowers. Its market includes home improvement, healthcare, retail and other substantial purchases. The common thread is a decision expensive enough for financing to influence whether it happens.
Who pays for the invisible work?
A 2022 account described licensing fees from merchants and lenders, plus lender transaction fees. That establishes the shape of the business model, rather than a current price list. In September 2021, Skeps announced a $9.5 million Series A led by Bertelsmann India Investments with Accel participating. In 2025 it confirmed a Series B with Spark Growth Ventures joining those investors.
The product extends beyond matching. Skeps offers institutions digital prescreening, fraud and identity workflows, digital cards, testing tools, and loan origination and management modules. Those capabilities explain why the sale involves operational integration as well as a checkout button. ChargeAfter and Jifiti offer alternative approaches to multi-lender or white-label financing; Skeps’s particular pitch emphasizes parallel evaluation and merchant control.
Borrow the design lesson
The idea worth copying is specific: put financing where the purchase decision happens, then measure applications, approvals and accepted offers separately. An approval that never becomes a purchase deserves investigation. So does a customer who abandons the form before a lender can respond.
The design has limits. More lenders help when their products and risk appetites cover different needs. They cannot manufacture an affordable offer for every borrower. The merchant still needs workable integration and staff who can explain the options. Skeps’s wager is that a better-organized lending process can keep a possible purchase alive long enough for a suitable offer to reach it.