About Aven

Aven's mission is to provide consumers with the lowest cost, most convenient, and most transparent access to capital. Responsible homeowners are eligible for the Aven Home Card, a credit card backed by home equity. Since Aven's lending is secured, borrowers are eligible for lines up to $250,000 at the lowest APR of any credit card in the U.S., guaranteed. Aven estimates that since its 2019 launch, it has saved customers more than $100 million in interest charges, issuing more than $1.5 billion in credit lines overall.

Challenge: High complexity to build embedded balance transfers in-house

Aven knew many of their new Home Card customers would want to consolidate high-interest revolving credit card balances with their low-APR home equity line. But prior to Method, the only option was the industry’s incumbent balance transfer process—a manual, weeks-long workflow that created friction for both lenders and consumers.

Why balance transfers are complex

Balance transfers are anything but simple. Customers often carry multiple credit cards across different issuers, each with its own balance and payoff amount. To move those balances, borrowers must locate every account, manually enter sensitive account details, provide creditor billing addresses and then wait two to three weeks for payments to post, by which time payoff amounts likely have changed. With no real-time confirmation and a high risk of failure from manual errors, the process creates frustration for consumers and a heavy support load for lenders.

Operational and compliance hurdles for lenders

For Aven, replicating this process internally would have meant building thousands of issuer connections, implementing PCI-compliant infrastructure, and standing up a full operations team to reconcile payments and manage errors. The cost and resource requirements were far outside their core focus.

The gap for customers

Aven needed a way to deliver a digital balance transfer experience that matched its mission of providing the lowest-cost, most convenient, and most transparent access to credit. Without a modern embedded balance transfer solution, Home Card customers would face friction consolidating their balances, leaving credit lines underutilized and missing out on the savings of lower-cost capital.

Solution

To overcome these hurdles, Aven partnered with Method to embed balance transfers directly into the Home Card experience. Using Method’s API for real-time liability data and payments, Aven could provide a fast, digital alternative to the industry’s manual process.

With connections to more than 1,500+ card issuers, Method enables consumers to permission access to their liabilities instantly. Instead of typing in account numbers, borrowers verify their identity with simple PII (e.g., name, date of birth, phone) and are immediately connected to all their credit card accounts.

From there, Method’s platform powers the end-to-end transfer from the newly issued HELOC:

• Real-time liability data: Current balances and APR ranges are surfaced so borrowers can see the cards where a transfer will drive the greatest savings.

• Embedded payment rails: Funds from the Aven Home Card are routed directly to creditors, with confirmation and settlement in 1–2 days rather than weeks.

• Transparent tracking: Aven’s team can monitor each transfer through Method’s dashboard, proactively update customers, and minimize support inquiries.

For users, the experience is simple: after they’re approved for the Home Card, they select the cards they want to pay down, enter transfer amounts, and submit – without ever re-entering sensitive details.

For Aven, the impact was just as significant: Method’s functionality went live in less than four weeks, without the cost and overhead of building PCI-compliant infrastructure or standing up a payment operations team.

Results

Since launching balance transfers with Method, the impact for Aven and its customers has been notable:

• Higher transfer volume: Monthly balance transfer volume per cardholder increased by 25%, helping customers save millions in excess interest payments.

• 10x faster transfers: A balance transfer process that would take weeks now settles in just 1–2 days with full visibility into payment tacking.

• Adoption at scale: More than $115M in balance transfers have been processed to date.

Want to build your own balance transfer experience?

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