Credit Kudos launches new Open Banking decision engine

By Megha Bhattacharya

Challenger credit reference agency Credit Kudos today launched a new Open Banking decision engine to enable credit providers to automate credit policies, grow their loan books, and implement real-time decisioning with no or minimal technical integration. Leading lenders Admiral Financial Services and 247 Money have already adopted the new technology, unlocking automated underwriting so they can transform their operations.

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.”

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.

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 added: “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.”