🦄 Walnut: Lending platform for health care bills

It’s no surprise that out-of-pocket health care costs can be challenging to manage, especially for those with limited insurance or for procedures that generally aren’t covered. With traditional lending services often inaccessible to many for health care purposes, unexpected health care bills lead to the bankruptcy of hundreds of thousands of families each year. Walnut is looking to address this by creating an easier way to pay—an accessible lending service that allows individuals to take care of medical bills through flexible monthly installments. Walnut checks a number of factors when deciding who to approve for a loan, including credit scores, previous payment history, and the user’s Walnut account age. Walnut directly negotiates terms with health care providers and offers 3, 6, and 12-month windows for bill repayment (for larger bills, they offer up to 48 months). Walnut is one of many players in the buy now, pay later space (a notable example is nate, a company we covered in 2021, which now offers users the ability to pay for purchases later). While its recent $100 million debt financing will enable more loans to be distributed, time will tell whether its business model will sustain itself, especially as we navigate this market downturn. Overall, however, we’re very excited by Walnut’s core mission and plan to improve financial health care accessibility.