ClearScore Introduces ‘D•One’ Open Banking and Data Insight Business
The ClearScore Group announced the launch of a new B2B business unit to offer UK lenders the most comprehensive and specialised open banking connectivity and transaction categorisation intelligence. D•One allows ClearScore to offer its wide range of financial partners, including many of the leading 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.
Justin Basini, CEO and Co-founder of The ClearScore Group, said, “We believe that the future of lending decision making will be the combination of a range of data to make better decisions. 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 we can help our 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.”
Connection and Categorisation
D•One’s Open Banking services consists of two products that clients can use independently or in combination: the first, ‘Connection•One’, provides the most 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 powerful deterministic approach to be developed. This approach to transaction categorisation allows lenders much greater confidence in making decisions leading to much more accurate outcomes for lenders and borrowers.
Through these two core services, D•One has successfully 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. 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 – and can also effectively manage applications from borrowers who may not be able to afford repayments.
Tim Kelleway, Director of D•One, said, “The risk landscape for lenders has changed and we’re here to help our partners navigate a fast-moving environment. While the use of alternative data in underwriting is still in its infancy, it will become a critical capability over the next few years.
“Our aim is to drastically reduce barriers to entry for lenders in adopting open banking across their platforms and acquisition channels. Our 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 – all delivered through a modern and highly performant tech stack.”
Secure and scalable technology
D•One operates a modern and 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 market – delivering consistent functionality and decisioning solutions agnostic of channel.
