Recognition underlines Finicity’s efforts to improve financial inclusion and deliver new technologies and solutions to change the credit-decisioning experience
Finicity, a leading provider of open banking solutions, was recognized by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) as a winner of its fifth-annual Residential Diversity and Inclusion Leadership Award under the category of Market Outreach Strategies. MBA presented the award to Finicity during a general session of its 2020 Virtual Annual Convention and Expo on Oct. 19.
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As part of MBA’s strategy and promotion of diversity and inclusion, the award recognizes member company initiatives that are specifically designed to increase outreach, marketing or products to attract customers from the industry’s fastest-growing market segments. The award commends the hard work, dedication and creativity of exemplary programs that focus on achieving organizational diversity and inclusion.
“We’re honored to have been recognized by MBA for our concerted efforts around diversity and inclusion,” said Steve Smith, Finicity CEO and Co-founder. “We feel there’s an increasing need to re-evaluate the current credit review process in a way that helps consumers from all backgrounds become more empowered to take control of their own financial data and make better financial decisions. We believe our secure open banking platform can truly help consumers benefit from their data, prove their creditworthiness for loans, and include more people in the traditional financial system.”
In its evaluation, MBA notes: “Finicity stood out for its unique platform to provide a more robust picture of creditworthiness for borrowers. We were particularly impressed by your efforts in improving access to homeownership.”
Finicity’s open banking platform is the engine that drives improvement in the lending process and has introduced several new products and partnerships to further the inclusion of more people in the traditional financial system. Leveraging the Finicity open banking platform’s robust data intelligence layer, Finicity Lend provides a new alternative data service, Cash Flow, that analyzes financial account data delivering a broad set of cash flow attributes. This gives lenders more accurate insights into a small business or individual’s creditworthiness.
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The Cash Flow analytics service digitizes and automates the capture and delivery of data that previously required significant combinations of manual and automated processes to extract and analyze. The use of this alternative data is supported by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, National Credit Union Administration, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as referenced in their Interagency Statement.
In addition, Finicity’s open banking platform provides the technology that empowers consumers to control and share their data to improve their financial lives. And now they can share their utility and phone payment data in order to improve their credit score.
Building on its leadership position with financial institution coverage, Finicity has added payroll data as a source from a leading payroll provider to further enhance Finicity’s open banking platform’s ability to verify consumer-permissioned income and employment details — critical to many lending use cases — with real-time, direct from the source data. These connections empower the consumer through better financial outcomes while at the same time reducing risk and providing better data for lenders to make better decisions.
Expanding the types of data used to determine creditworthiness addresses longtime consumer concerns that have resurfaced recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn. According to a recent study by Finicity, 82% of consumers said they believe the current credit review process and criteria need to change to make it easier for responsible borrowers to prove their creditworthiness and increase access to loans.
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