The foundation beneath smarter credit: why infrastructure determines who gets access

Cash flow underwriting is having a moment. And for good reason. Research from FinRegLab shows that machine learning models combining cash flow and credit bureau data can increase credit approvals by about 4% at mainstream risk cutoffs, without increasing defaults. To put that in perspective: applied to 2023 origination volumes, that translates to roughly two million additional credit card accounts and 152,000 additional mortgages. For an estimated 32 million Americans who can’t be scored under widely used credit models, that’s not an incremental improvement. It’s a fundamentally different outcome.