After decades of relying primarily on traditional credit reports and scores, some of the largest and most sophisticated financial institutions in North America are rapidly adopting cash flow underwriting, a transformative approach to understanding creditworthiness based on consumers’ real-time banking history.Traditional credit reports reveal little about how people earn, save, spend, or manage their money, leaving lenders with an incomplete picture of creditworthiness. The consequences are enormous: tens of billions of dollars are lost to defaults each year, while tens of millions of creditworthy consumers and small businesses remain shut out of mainstream credit or pay more than they should.At Prism Data, we’ve spent more than ten years pioneering, proving, and deploying a better approach. Our founding insight was that data found within bank accounts, but beyond the four corners of a credit report, could materially improve lenders’ ability to assess risk across the credit spectrum, unlocking value for lenders, lowering costs for consumers, and expanding access to credit for the underserved.What has surprised even us is the pace at which the market is now embracing cash flow underwriting.Quietly, Prism has been leading this transformation.Today, Prism works with three of the five largest fintech lenders in the United States and six of the ten largest digital banks. Prism’s technology is distributed through leading financial data and credit infrastructure providers like Equifax, Plaid, and LexisNexis. And we’re currently working with several of the country’s largest traditional banks to implement cash flow underwriting for millions more consumers and small businesses.Our API volume tells the story of that widespread adoption. Over the past two years, the number of API requests banks and lenders have made for Prism solutions has increased more than 100x, representing an average compounded growth rate of more than 20% per month for two consecutive years. There is no better measure of how quickly cash flow underwriting has moved from the margins into the mainstream of lending.These days, new models can be built faster than ever. Trust is a different story. The first CashScore® model was deployed for consumer credit decisioning by an FDIC-regulated financial institution in 2018. In the years since, it has been tested and used across hundreds of lending portfolios, comprising tens of billions of dollars in loan originations, and has undergone extensive model validation, compliance and regulatory audits, capital markets scrutiny, and independent fair lending testing.That track record is difficult to replicate. It has earned CashScore the confidence of lenders, bank partners, regulators, and capital markets participants. With that foundation, we believe that CashScore is now the most widely adopted cash flow-based credit score in North America. But what matters most isn’t how many scores we produce. It’s what better information makes possible.At Synchrony, cash flow underwriting helped enable nearly 50,000 incremental approvals in 2025 for consumers who otherwise would have been declined. Synchrony has said it expects to open between 150,000 and 250,000 new accounts through cash flow underwriting this year, with these customers performing in line with its broader portfolio and within target credit risk. These aren’t just abstract decisions. Behind them are people gaining access to credit they would otherwise have been denied, because their lender now sees a more complete picture of their creditworthiness.NoYesFundraising News22 Oct, 2026