ClearScore Group to offer lenders Open Banking connectivity

D•One allows ClearScore to offer its wide range of financial partners, including credit card providers and banks in the UK, a way to accelerate consumers’ bank data into mainstream lending. D•One has been built on the Group’s acquisition of Money Dashboard, which closed in early 2022.

There is a huge opportunity for lenders to use open banking to enhance the underwriting process by identifying financial behaviour that materially splits risk within credit score bands and allows more accurate affordability assessments. Through D•One, ClearScore aims to help their partners both manage their risk more effectively and increase their addressable market by identifying users who might otherwise have been screened out due to credit score data.

The products

D•One’s Open Banking services consists of two products that clients can use independently or in combination. The first, ‘Connection•One’, provides a comprehensive set of Open Banking connections in the market to 46 financial institutions. Connection•One powers a client’s Open Banking sign-up and authorisation process and can be white-labelled or fully managed by D•One.

The second product is ‘Category•One’, an advanced transaction categorisation engine which allows clients to classify and analyse bank account transactions. Category•One has been developed over the past decade and has benefited from well over 1 billion transactions being categorised allowing a deterministic approach to be developed. This approach to transaction categorisation allows lenders greater confidence in making decisions leading to much more accurate outcomes for lenders and borrowers.

Through these two core services, D•One has identified a range of financial behaviours (such as making deposits to a savings account) offering the ability to ‘split risk’, or more accurately categorise the riskiness of borrowers.

The help offered to lenders

Lenders are now able to leverage these key indicators to identify less risky potential borrowers. This means lenders can increase their addressable market by differentiating good borrowers from those that might otherwise have been declined based on credit score data alone.

D•One’s services are fully optimised to specific lender needs such as the ability to verify income, accurately assess essential expenditure, and identify clear indicators of lending risk.

D•One operates a fully cloud-based tech stack with micro-services architecture for maximum speed and reliability. Its Open Banking connection and categorisation services are available to lenders and/or introducer partners to support credit brokering and application processes across the marker – delivering consistent functionality and decisioning solutions agnostic of channel.

ClearScore helps people access, and save money on, credit cards, loans, and car finance. The group is one of the largest enablers of Open Banking in the UK, with over 1.5 million users having connected their accounts through its platform. D•One powers ClearScore’s Open Banking capability – fully refreshing bank data on its users to the tune of 3.5 million bank API calls every day.