Imprint’s cloud-based ledger system allows retailers to micro-target rewards. Does it have a shot against big branded-card issuers like Synchrony and Capital One?
By Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff
Having cycled through jobs as a corporate lawyer, financial services consultant at McKinsey and vice president of operations at WeWork, Daragh Murphy was determined to do a fintech startup–something, perhaps, to help credit unions get up to date. But in April 2020, he got a call from Gaurav Ahuja, a venture capitalist at Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, with an alternative plan. As Murphy tells it, Ahuja said, “We hear you’re working on a fintech idea. We don’t love that idea, but we like what we’ve heard about you.”
As Murphy and Ahuja talked on long, masked walks through pandemic-devastated New York, they both became keen on Ahuja’s idea: a cloud-based credit card platform that would allow brands to customize rewards and micro-target promotions for their best customers to a degree older technology wouldn’t.
Last week, Imprint, the company they founded with former Thrive employee Michael Pechman, raised $500 million in new debt financing from Japanese bank Mizuho, Charlotte-based Truist and U.K. bank HSBC. That brings Imprint’s total lending capacity to more than $1 billion. The startup was valued at $800 million in a previously undisclosed November 2024 fundraise, according to a person familiar with the deal, and counts Thrive, Kleiner Perkins, Ribbit Capital and Khosla Ventures among its backers. It has raised $300 million in equity funding since its founding five years ago.
Murphy, 35, is the CEO. Ahuja, who is chairman, reached out to him because he had heard Murphy was the kind of entrepreneur “who will give every last drop of blood” to make a startup work.
Not long ago, lending money to consumers looked like a losing business for fintechs, best left to big banks with a lower cost of capital. Investors and CEOs pointed to the underwhelming outcomes of companies like LendingClub and Prosper, dismissing lenders as destined for second-rate market values and investment returns. But over the past five years, with the growth and profitability of now-public businesses such as Nubank and Affirm, opinions have started to shift, paving the way for a new class of fintechs to try their luck as specialty lenders.
Six lending-focused businesses, including Imprint, made their debut on the 2025 edition of Forbes’ annual Fintech 50 list. Imprint draws 60% of its revenue from interest payments from consumers who don’t pay their card balances in full each month.
More than 400,000 consumers have signed up for cards issued by Imprint, and it manages $450 million in outstanding loans. Murphy’s startup brought in $70 million in revenue in 2024, up from $15 million in 2023. No, it’s not profitable yet–it burned about $35 million last year, Murphy says, adding that he still has over $100 million in cash in the bank and expects the operation to turn profitable on a GAAP basis in 2026.
So far, Imprint has signed up eight brands, including H-E-B, Texas’ largest grocery chain; Turkish Airlines; Brooks Brothers; Eddie Bauer and Holiday Inn Club Vacations. In addition to offering a finer targeting of rewards, Murphy tries to go easier on late fees than his big-bank competitors that also sell co-branded cards, which include Barclays, Synchrony, U.S. Bank and Capital One. He does that by making concessions like forgiving the late fee for cardholders the first time they miss a payment and allowing a five-day grace period for people to pay their bill before getting slapped with the fee.
“We compete against these massive banks, so there really isn’t fintech competition for what we’ve been doing. And the banks are just old,” says Murphy, sporting gelled-back hair and speaking from the startup’s sleek New York office that sits a stone’s throw from Wall Street, on the 23rd floor of a high-rise, with views of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazzano Bridge. Other fintechs like Cardless and Deserve that offer co-branded card services have struggled to sustain their growth.
Daragh Murphy was born and went to college in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the U.S. to attend law school at Duke. He got hired as an associate at WilmerHale in New York, where he lasted three years. “I hated it,” he says. Murphy became a McKinsey consultant and left three years later to join WeWork, where he worked on projects like setting the company’s sales and pricing strategies. He departed in September 2019, “a little before it all ended in misery,” as he puts it.
When Ahuja called with his credit card idea, Murphy got it–as a consultant, he had seen how banks were limited in the types of rewards programs they could offer due to their reliance on inflexible third-party technology. (Over time, Ahuja became less active in Imprint’s operations–today he splits his time between Imprint and investing for his own venture fund, Timeless. Pechman left Imprint in 2023 and is working on a new startup, according to his LinkedIn profile.)
The technology advantage Imprint touts over older providers is its home-grown transaction ledger system. This lets it make better use of alternative data and establish more granular, item-level connections between a consumers’ purchases and the rewards that accrue on their cards, the startup says.
That tech is how H-E-B cardholders can get 5% cash back when they buy the grocer’s private label, store-branded products, but just 1.5% when they buy anything else. Imprint has a travel card coming out this year where cardholders will get 4% cash back while they’re on vacation–Imprint’s system will link to consumers’ travel reservations to verify when they’ll be away. Imprint says its software also lets businesses test the effectiveness of different marketing and rewards schemes and that its consumer credit card app is easier to use than those of the incumbents.
While Imprint’s own technology is new, its customers’ payments systems are often dated, making Imprint’s integrations arduous. “We send our four deployed engineers to sit with you in Houston and work with you for three months. We’ll be in the shared Slack channel, celebrating birthdays, doing pizza parties and pulling all-nighters together,” Murphy quips. “Our job is to be a technology company, but also almost a services company.” Typically, the larger the customer and the more dated their current technology is, the harder it is to integrate and use all the features of newfangled software.
Interest rates on Imprint’s cards are similar to those of competitors like Synchrony and Barclays, Murphy says. The cost of its late fees seem to be similar as well, with a $27 charge for your second infraction (the first one is forgiven) and up to $35 after that, according to cardholder agreements for several of its cards.
Since Imprint isn’t a bank, it partners with Salt Lake City-based First Electronic Bank to originate loans. Imprint shares the revenue it earns on cardholders’ monthly interest payments with First Electronic. (Murphy says about half of Imprint’s cardholders carry a balance and pay monthly interest.) Beyond the 60% of Imprint’s revenue that comes from interest income, the interchange fees merchants pay when consumers swipe their Imprint cards make up another 35%. The last 5% comes primarily from annual-card and late fees.
Murphy is chasing national and large regional brands as customers, and he’s looking for businesses that consumers have an ongoing relationship with. Grocery store chains, hotel brands, travel services and pet companies are among his targets. Today, H-E-B makes up roughly 35% of Imprint’s revenue, though Murphy expects that to fall below 20% by the end of 2025 as his startup grows. He won’t share his revenue projection for 2025 but says the fast growth will continue. Imprint’s revenue expanded by more than four times last year, and this year, “We’ll probably be plus or minus a turn on that,” he says.
This summer, Imprint plans to start letting its customers offer standalone buy-now, pay-later loans alongside their branded credit cards. Imprint cardholders will also be able to transfer a buy-now, pay-later loan to an Imprint card to earn rewards. A year ago, Synchrony also made a move into point-of-sale installment loans when it bought Ally Lending, which then managed $2 billion in outstanding loans to businesses ranging from roofing companies to dentists.
Murphy says Imprint might eventually try to become a bank, which would significantly reduce the cost of capital it incurs in its lending business. To fund its loans, the startup says it pays between 1.5% to 2.5% above the benchmark Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR), which is currently 4.3%, leading to a cost of funds that exceeds 6%. By comparison, Synchrony, a chartered bank that sits atop a base of more than $80 billion in consumer deposits that it can lend from, reported a 4.7% cost of funds in 2024. Synchrony manages more than $100 billion in consumer loans, a book that’s more than 200 times the size of Imprint’s.
“We’ve always had this dream that someday we may want to get our own bank license,” Murphy says, adding that the decision will rest on several factors. “Is it even a regulatory possibility? For the last six or seven years, it has not been,” he notes. The other questions: “Are we mature enough to do this? Are we in the right financial position? Do we have the right talent?”
He faces a tough road ahead. One challenge is that behind each new customer lurks a frightening risk. If Imprint botches its risk assessments and overestimates how many consumers will pay back their loans, it will lose a lot of money. “In lending, some deals are bad deals,” cofounder Ahuja says. “We have the right to be picky.”
Murphy says the default rate for Imprint’s cardholders is hovering around its target of 4% to 4.5%. Its cardholders earn a median income of $85,000 and have average FICO credit scores between 715 and 720. (By comparison, the average default rate for all U.S. credit cards was 4.7% in the fourth quarter of 2024, and the average FICO score was 715 for the full year.)
Another daunting risk: Lending is capital-intensive, but the supply of capital can be unpredictable. Capital markets can freeze up, making funding scarce and expensive. Fintech lender Upstart has suffered from this setback over the past few years, causing its stock to slump periodically. “What we can’t control is the macro environment,” says Imprint investor Mamoon Hamid, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. “That predicates the terms that make our business great, good or not great.”
Perhaps the biggest hurdle will be getting over the hump of building a profitable, sustainable business. Imprint’s operating costs are high, though Murphy says revenue is increasing at a much faster rate. The CEO says his startup will become profitable on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis in 2026 and that Imprint is “growing faster than almost any non-AI company.”
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