Vergent LMS Partners with EDGE to Deliver Open Banking Credit Risk Insights to Lenders
Ridgeland, Miss. & Chicago, IL, February 7, 2024 – Vergent LMS, a premier fintech lending platform, will now offer alternative credit risk analytics and scoring through its partnership with EDGE, a leading provider of cash flow underwriting and risk assessment services for lenders serving subprime customers.
This partnership will provide lenders with the ability to look beyond traditional credit scores with attributes based on financial activities and behaviors from consumers’ checking and savings accounts.
EDGE connects lenders to nearly every financial account in the U.S. to enable cashflow underwriting, including income verification and credit risk assessment. These attributes better equip lenders to make informed decisions regarding the tens of millions of applicants whose traditional credit report falls below the prime watermark.
“Automation is a key path to growth for lenders. Our partnership with Edge enriches our platform with customer credit risk assessments, data, and overall business goals,” said Scott Putnam, CEO of Vergent. “Through this collaboration, we’re able to provide another world-class feature that enhances customer service while also meeting automation needs for lenders and borrowers alike.”
Vergent’s platform provides lenders with automated risk decisioning through a suite of customizable software settings that manage multiple credit risk thresholds. This automated real-time process empowers lenders to make fast and accurate decisions critical to issuing loans with amounts and terms appropriate for their borrowers.
Through Vergent, lenders will receive access to a comprehensive suite of APIs to assist with integration and automation, as well as a lender portal that streamlines processes and provides unlimited support for tech teams and customers. Borrowers benefit by receiving live support via phone, chat, or email. This partnership will create a user-friendly experience that eliminates the need for an account or routing number.
“Launching our partnership with Vergent solidifies EDGE’s commitment to providing next generation solutions that encourage a holistic view of each applicant,” said Brock Leong, Sales Director at Edge.
“Vergent’s innovative management platform is an excellent opportunity to showcase EDGE’s cashflow-based underwriting,” continued Putnam. “From application, to origination, to servicing, our technologies complement each other to ensure lenders make lending decisions based on verified real-time data about an applicant’s ability to repay. By delivering these insights automatically, EDGE and Vergent are able to help their customers make better approval choices and improve loan terms.”
EDGE delivers an end to end set of capabilities to Vergent customers that leverage consumer permissioned access to banking activity data including balance information, verification and timing of direct deposits, credit risk assessment, fraud prevention, and monitoring for collections insights along with customizable decision-trees and risk thresholds.
Cashflow underwriting is a driving force behind expanding credit access to the nearly 50 million US adults with thin or no file at mainstream credit bureaus. By enabling lenders to more accurately evaluated creditworthiness for this population as well as the tens of millions more who have credit scores below the prime threshold, more consumers are able to access needed funds and build a history of responsible behavior.
“Vergent and EDGE are together at the forefront of the financial inclusion movement, using income, spending, and balance behaviors to help meet the needs of creditors and borrowers alike,” said Brian Reshefsky, CEO of EDGE. “We’re confident that seamless delivery these real-time insights to Vergent customers will help more lenders see the value in cash flow underwriting.”
About EDGE
EDGE is a consumer reporting agency based on open banking data from an optimized portfolio of bank data aggregators and risk analytics built by lenders for lenders for actionable insights into consumer creditworthiness. The platform was launched by the lenders, entrepreneurs, and data scientists who pioneered data-driven digital lending for Everyday Americans two decades ago. EDGE delivers risk insights for use cases across the credit account lifecycle that have been performance-tested on real world lending decisions on over three billion bank transactions linked to over half a billion dollars in loans since 2017.
