Back in 2009, it was all the rage to build a direct lender. It didn't matter where the capital came from — it could have been from a marketplace of investors or off a balance sheet. But the idea was that you could build a massive scalable business by going direct. There were some companies that emerged from that time period successful but it proved very hard.

Others like LendKey took a B2B tack. Instead of going out and building a borrower acquisition model, they would work with lending institutions like regional banks and credit unions to power their lending businesses. After growing and exiting Dealertrack, Vince Passione, the former CTO of Citi's US consumer bank, saw an opportunity to found and lead LendKey.

Vince joins us on the show to talk about his partnership model and the challenges and opportunities of working alongside banks and credit unions, which have deployed more than $2 billion in lending capital on the digital platform.