Big news: @Avant is partnering with @NASCAR. 🏁 We're teaming up with NASCAR® to launch a card program starting in 2027 built around fans, rewards, and the sport they love. Avant, LLC is a financial technology company, not a bank. Avant-branded credit products are issued by WebBank. Learn more: nascar.com/news-media/2026/0…

26 Avantees recently headed to Montrose Harbor for the Lurie Children's Hospital Corporate Cup. At this fundraiser, local companies compete in relay races and field games to support the hospital. Avant’s 2026 team was more than twice the size of last year's (way to show up, Avantees)! We competed in the rain for most of the afternoon, but that was a small price to pay for such a worthy cause. At the time this is posted, the event has raised nearly $200,000 for the patients and families at Lurie Children's. You can add your contribution here: events.luriechildrens.org/co… Thank you to Aliza Lopez and Lexie Gore for rallying our team, and to every Avantee who showed up in the rain. We're hoping for sunshine next year, but we’ll be there either way ☀️

Avantee Qin Liu believes the only constant in life is change. So what’s kept her in the same place for 8 years? Qin says it’s the way her role at Avant keeps her learning. Since joining us in 2018, she has worked on three different teams, each time saying yes when a new opportunity came along that aligned with where she wanted to grow. Read our full interview with Qin here: avant.com/blog/avant/meet-qi…

Scenes from our quarterly Fun Committee meeting 📋 ✅ Reviewed employee feedback to get a clear read on which events Avantees have been enjoying most ✅ Locked in plans for the rest of 2026, including Halloween, Thanksgiving, and year-end events ✅ Used employee feedback to map out 2027 with ideas the committee was most excited about Thanks to all the Avantees who work together to bring fun and meaningful events to the office 🎃

Today marks a major milestone: Avant has filed an application with the OCC and FDIC to establish an insured national bank, Avant Bank, N.A. Since our founding in 2012, our mission has been to move financial lives forward for the more than 100 million everyday Americans overlooked by the legacy financial system. If approved, a national bank charter would let us bring credit, banking products, and financial health tools together in one integrated digital banking platform under a single regulatory framework. It would also give us more direct control over the customer experience and access to a lower cost of funds through deposits. We are proud of the data-driven approach to credit and strong operating foundation that brought us here. We recognize the application is just the first step in a long journey ahead, one that will require sustained discipline. We look forward to working closely with the OCC and FDIC on this next phase. Read the full announcement: globenewswire.com/news-relea…

Avant has signed a multi-year forward flow agreement with InterVest Capital Partners. InterVest has committed to purchase up to $1 billion of personal loans facilitated through Avant's platform over a 24-month period — another step in diversifying Avant's funding base alongside whole loan sales and securitizations. "InterVest brings meaningful experience in specialty finance and consumer credit," said CFO Kevin Friedrich. "This agreement gives us added flexibility as we keep investing in our platform for the customers who rely on us." More in the full release: globenewswire.com/news-relea… #Fintech #ConsumerLending

When Charles Whittaker was little, he'd put on a suit and walk around with a briefcase and keys (“I was the only kid in school who wore a suit to picture day”). He just wanted to be a businessman. Now he's Avant's Chief Business Officer. He’s been with us since 2013, and he credits staying for over a decade to the trust he’s built with his peers, and to the wide variety of work that keeps his days interesting. Read Charles’ full @ Avant interview here: avant.com/blog/avant/meet-ch…

🌳 A crew of Avantees recently spent a glorious summer afternoon at Northerly Island cleaning up the park and the lakefront trails. As part of @ChiParksfdn's Pitch In for Parks program, we got to enjoy good weather and good company, and we left the greenspace a little better than we found it. It was the perfect way to use a few of our Volunteer Time Off hours. Thanks to the Fun Committee for putting this event together, and to all the Avantees who pitched in.

⌛ Mastercard set a target to phase out 16-digit card numbers from physical cards by 2030. Digital wallet payments already work this way through the process of tokenization, which substitutes a unique identifier and one time transaction code for the card number at the point of sale and online. It’s more secure than transmitting your 16-digit card number every time you pay. The 2030 Mastercard target accelerates a shift that was already underway. Tokenized payment infrastructure has been expanding across the industry, and that target puts a concrete timeline on that transition. Avant launched digital wallet support for the Avant Card with this shift in mind. Tokenized transactions already keep card numbers out of the payment flow, so customers using the digital wallet see that benefit today, ahead of the transition. Building the infrastructure now means customers benefit sooner than if we wait for the industry to catch up. *Avant, LLC is a financial technology company, not a bank. Avant-branded credit products are issued by WebBank.

When a test suite gets slow, engineers start finding ways around it. Avant Co-Founder and CIO Paul Zhang shared the rule his teams use to avoid that: green tests plus a peer review means it ships, with no manual gate after that. He also gets into why he says "you can't DORA your way to quality if the underlying commitment isn't there," and what it takes to keep a large test suite fast enough that nobody routes around it. Read the full piece from Built In Chicago here: builtinchicago.org/articles/…

Nick Wolff has been part of Avant twice. That probably tells you something. Our CTO recently sat down to talk about why he’s been here for a decade total, and he keeps coming back to one thing: you can actually get things done. No red tape or bureaucracy, just interesting problems and the autonomy to solve them. That, and a culture where there are genuinely no dumb questions. Read the full interview to hear more from Nick, including why he'd have been Steve Young if things had gone differently: avant.com/blog/avant/meet-ni…

More and more Avant customers are adopting digital wallet, with usage skewing toward everyday purchases that happen multiple times a week. That frequency actually has a cumulative security benefit. When a customer pays with their digital wallet instead of their physical Avant Card, their 16-digit card number isn't transmitted. Instead, Mastercard's tokenization process substitutes a unique identifier and generates a one-time transaction code for every purchase, so if a terminal is compromised, an attacker doesn’t get reusable card credentials. The more often routine purchases run through the digital wallet, the more your actual card number stays out of transactions entirely. We’re building on this adoption with planned enhancements that will make digital wallet (and its security benefits) easier to access from the start: 🔹 Today, customers can add their card after receiving it in the mail. 🔹 Next, enrollment will be available directly from the mobile app, no physical card needed. 🔹 Once instant issuance launches, customers will be able to add their Avant Card to their digital wallet and start using it for purchases within minutes of approval. *Avant, LLC is a financial technology company, not a bank. Avant-branded credit products are issued by WebBank.

Last week, Avantees came together for our quarterly Town Hall and our 2026 Summer Party. We're glad so many of us could make it in! And we missed everybody who couldn't. It was a genuinely great night, with good people and a lot to celebrate after a strong first half of the year. Even an air quality alert couldn't stop the fun—we just moved the party inside and kept it going. Thanks to everyone who came out. We had a blast. Here's to a strong back half of 2026. ☀️🍻

A lot of companies are rolling out AI tools right now. What are they doing to ensure people actually know how to use them? This year, Avant has been running team-specific AI enablement sessions for every non-technical team in the company. The structure is the same across the board: ⛰️ Landscape overview: What's happened in AI over the last couple of years and how Avant is approaching enterprise-wide implementation ⌨️ Hands-on platform time: Walking through our AI tools directly and showing how to use them ✍️ Team-specific use cases: Showing how these tools fit into each team's actual workflows 💡 Tips and tricks by skill level: Practical guidance for beginners, intermediate users, and people who were already comfortable with the tools These sessions meet people where they are, whether they've never used AI before or are already fairly comfortable with it. The goal is for every Avantee to walk away with something concrete to try, so that we’re all confidently using these tools as we become a more AI-native company.

What keeps leaders growing, even after years in the industry? For Avant’s Chief Risk Officer, Nikhil Mehra, it’s being in an environment that encourages disciplined risk-taking and keeps him learning alongside talented teammates. In his role, Nikhil moves between deep problem-solving and big-picture thinking, staying close to the details while helping guide the business forward. He’s also a proud “boomerang,” having returned to Avant because he missed the entrepreneurial energy and sense of ownership that comes with the work. Read more about Nikhil’s leadership perspective and why Avant’s culture keeps him engaged: avant.com/blog/avant/meet-ni…

Last week, Avant welcomed our ten summer interns to the office. They'll be contributing across teams throughout the summer and getting a firsthand look at our products, people, and culture along the way. To our interns, Sanam Choudhary, Harshvardhan Sekar, Kevin Pigney, Justin To, Teresa Nguyen, Adele Groom, Tiffany S., Kaleb Bandele, Nour Ayyash, and Dhanush Ramachandran—we’re honored to be a part of your career journey, and we’re excited for everything we’ll accomplish together. Big shoutout to Joel Reimann and the People Team for recruiting and supporting this group.

New research from the @NFAPResearch found that 59% of America's privately held billion-dollar startups have at least one immigrant founder, with a collective value of $5 trillion. We’re one of them—all 3 of our founders are immigrants. Our CEO, @goldstein2002 , is one of the founders @Forbes highlighted in their coverage of this research. He came to the U.S. in 1988 as an 8-year-old refugee from Uzbekistan when his family fled state-level anti-Semitism, and didn't speak English when he arrived. Al went on to co-found Avant in 2012 alongside CIO Paul Zhang and John Sun, both of whom also came to the U.S. as children from China. The study examined 775 unicorn companies and found that nearly 80% have an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role. Immigrant-founded companies in this group have created an average of 833 jobs per company. We’re proud that Avant is a part of that $5 trillion figure. forbes.com/sites/stuartander…

☀️ Summer has arrived at Avant. Our new beach volleyball team is a few games into its season, and things are starting to click—Arthi Aneel even scored her first Avant aces. Shoutout to Allison Pierce for organizing, and to Arthi, Aashesh Nareshchand, Hrushi Nikam, Kaley Ubellacker, Karthik Prabhu Palimar, Matthew Fan, Nikhil Manjunath, Sayli Mahajan, Tiara Johnson, Tyler Fitzgerald, and Yanxiang Ding for bringing it every game. The season is young, and we’ll be cheering them on the whole way. And as of last week, Summer Fridays are back, too: Avantees log off at 2pm on Fridays through the end of summer. Because a few extra hours of daylight on a Friday afternoon really add up. Proud to work somewhere that takes the season seriously 🍉

Conversational AI has become an entry point for financial services. Thanks to a new application from Experian Loans, consumers can now explore personal loan options inside ChatGPT, with Avant* as part of the network behind it. The Experian Loans ChatGPT application connects borrowers to lender options without leaving the chat interface. It's an early example of financial services meeting consumers in the tools they already use. "As consumers increasingly expect financial tools to be integrated into the digital experiences they already use every day, platforms like ChatGPT are creating new opportunities to simplify how borrowers explore lending options," said Charles Whittaker, Chief Business Officer at Avant. "Through our partnership with Experian, we are able to connect consumers with personalized options in a more seamless and accessible way." businesswire.com/news/home/2… *Avant, LLC is a financial technology company, not a bank. Avant-branded credit products are issued by WebBank.