GM Financial has expanded its partnership with Spring Labs through a $23 million Series A funding round, the startup announced on Wednesday. The round was led by GreatPoint Ventures “with significant participation from existing investors,” including General Motors Ventures, August Capital and RRE Ventures, among others, according to a press release.
Through the GM Ventures investment, GM Financial, along with more than 20 other financial institutions, is co-developing the first applications to be built on Spring Labs’ platform, called Spring Protocol. The first products being built on the blockchain platform are designed to tackle auto financing fraud, which has increased nearly five times between 2011 and 2018, the release noted. The products include an enhanced identity verification tool, a loan stacking prevention tool and a fraud monitoring and mitigation solution.
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“These products are designed to improve customer on-boarding processes” and “will deliver anonymous data to lenders in a variety of verticals, including unsecured consumer lending, small business lending, credit card issuance [and] secured auto lending,” according to the release.
Adam Jiwan, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Spring Labs, noted that GM Financial has played “an active role in the evaluation of products and use cases on the Spring Protocol.” In February, AFN reported that GM Financial joined Spring Labs’ blockchain network to strengthen fraud prevention and detection capabilities.
“GM Financial is excited to deepen its relationship with Spring Labs and we look forward to the launch of the Spring products, as we believe they have the potential to better protect our customers from fraudulent activity,” said Mike Kanarios, chief strategy officer at GM Financial, in the release.
