Credit Kudos launches real-time Open Banking decision platform

Challenger credit reference agency Credit Kudos, has launched a new Open Banking decision engine which its says will enable credit providers to automate credit policies, grow their loan books, and implement real-time decisioning with no or minimal technical integration.

Lenders Admiral Financial Services and 247 Money have already adopted the new technology.

Credit Kudos’ Assembly enables credit providers to automate policies, saving thousands of hours of underwriters’ time. With Assembly, credit providers can also trial and forecast automated policies on different population groups without the need for analysts to manually test these changes. This further improves operational efficiencies and allows lenders to extend their services to more people as they can easily determine how to grow loan books with minimal risk. Credit providers can then deploy these policies into their customer journey immediately.

Assembly allows lenders to build policies based on Credit Kudos’ insights, built using Open Banking and loan outcome data. These insights help providers reduce defaults and increase acceptances. Using Assembly, credit providers can also combine other data sources, for example a bureau score or applicant-stated income, into the one decision engine.

Admiral Financial Services is using it to further automate its underwriting process to save time and costs, while 247 Money is using it to help address its current underserved applicant population. This is something it previously would not have been able to do but now can as the significant manual load of underwriting is removed. In a pilot of the solution, 247 Money found that the Assembly process gave them the ability to make instant risk assessments on thousands of potential consumers who have very limited credit file information. It enabled the team to amend the rules applied for these consumers, allowing them to react quickly to market changes and to balance risk across the portfolio.

Angus Clacher, Head of Product, Credit Kudos, said “Our technology is transforming and modernising the lending sector to benefit both credit providers and borrowers. Our latest solution – Assembly – helps credit providers to scale by growing their loan book without having to increase operational costs, while borrowers benefit from much faster decisions.

“We’re hugely excited by Assembly – it promises to re-engineer the lending process by giving credit providers the power of an entire data science team in one simple, inline solution.”

Nicholas Jones, Head of Customer Fulfilment, Admiral Financial Services, said “Assembly will be a real game-changer for us – allowing us to drill into the customer data available in the rich Open Banking environment to better automate, and speed up, our decision-making processes.”

“This will make us more operationally efficient by significantly reducing the time spent on manual processes, but will also allow us to extend our services to more people thanks to the more comprehensive picture of affordability that the system provides.”

Jon Timmis, Head of Credit Risk, 247 Money said “We’re looking forward to expanding our existing partnership with Credit Kudos to take even greater advantage of the vast possibilities that Open Banking provides us as a lender. With Assembly, we’re confident we can responsibly increase the number of applications that we accept – something we previously could not have done without significant overheads or internal investment in technology.”