Worth Gives Financial Institutions the Power to Approve Small Business Applications in Real Time with Decision Intelligence

The first-of-its-kind AI decisioning layer instantly turns a verified small business application into an accurate decision, inside the institution’s own underwriting playbook, clearing manual review queues that stall good businesses and revenue

Worth, the onboarding and underwriting platform used by the global top 1% of banks and lenders, launches Decision Intelligence, helping financial institutions turn completed small business applications for credit cards, merchant accounts, bank accounts and loans into decisions in real time instead of weeks. A restaurant owner making payroll, a contractor waiting on materials and an e-retailer restocking ahead of peak season all depend on that answer arriving in time.

According to Federal Reserve small business lending data, a traditional bank can take 30 to 60 days to reach a decision on a completed business application. Much of that time is spent chasing down mismatches between an applicant’s tax filings, bank statements and state registration. Delays result from administrative friction, rather than from evaluating whether the business qualifies. Underwriters absorb that friction as work: requesting documents, re-keying the same figures across systems and clearing alerts that turn out to be nothing.

Decision Intelligence draws on Worth’s database of more than 350 million verified business identities and proprietary Crosswalking Technology to look beyond the application itself. The platform automatically verifies ownership structures, related business entities and state filings, resolving identity mismatches before credit models or fraud checks run. When information is missing, the platform doesn’t just flag it. It sources the data on the institution’s behalf, resolves it, and cues Decision Intelligence to act, closing the gap automatically.

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“We started Worth because we lived this problem ourselves,” said Sal Rehmetullah, co-founder and CEO of Worth. “Even when small business owners are creditworthy, the system can’t always see that clearly. Decision Intelligence gives our partners the data to move faster and the accuracy to decide better. When you reduce the noise in the decision, more capital flows to the businesses that should have had it all along and institutions that are looking to serve them.”

Most AI deployments in financial services stop at running an analysis and making a recommendation, and an underwriter still has to decide what to do with it. Decision Intelligence advances that standard. Rather than verifying a business and adding the file to the queue for manual judgment, the platform resolves the truth about a business and acts on it based on the institution’s own underwriting policies, applied check by check, with the reason for every outcome tied to the policy version in force when the decision was made. That frees underwriting teams to focus on higher-value work.

CODI, Worth’s conversational platform agent named for Continuous Decision Intelligence, provides an accessible, live window into that process. An underwriter can ask why a case scored a particular way, what documentation is missing, or what changed on a monitored account and get a direct, traceable answer instead of a black-box output.

“Decision Intelligence lets institutions make more accurate decisions faster, approving more of the right businesses and pulling revenue forward, while every agent stays inside defined guardrails, and every decision is auditable,” said Jacques Fu, co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Worth. “It makes underwriting teams stronger and more equipped to scale approvals alongside this growing volume without sacrificing decision quality. Nothing like this has existed before, and it’s going to change how small businesses and financial services operate forever.”

Decision Intelligence keeps working after approval. It monitors the live portfolio and re-underwrites a business the moment the facts change, rather than on an annual review. When a registration lapses, ownership shifts, a processing profile drifts from what was approved, or a new adverse signal appears, that account is re-checked against the policy that approved it, then cleared or escalated with the reasoning attached.