After decades of relying primarily on traditional credit reports and scores, some of the largest and most sophisticated financial institutions in North America are rapidly adopting cash flow underwriting, a transformative approach to understanding creditworthiness based on consumers’ real-time banking history.
Traditional credit reports reveal little about how people earn, save, spend, or manage their money, leaving lenders with an incomplete picture of creditworthiness. The consequences are enormous: tens of billions of dollars are lost to defaults each year, while tens of millions of creditworthy consumers and small businesses remain shut out of mainstream credit or pay more than they should.
At Prism Data, we’ve spent more than ten years pioneering, proving, and deploying a better approach. Our founding insight was that data found within bank accounts, but beyond the four corners of a credit report, could materially improve lenders’ ability to assess risk across the credit spectrum, unlocking value for lenders, lowering costs for consumers, and expanding access to credit for the underserved.
What has surprised even us is the pace at which the market is now embracing cash flow underwriting.
Quietly, Prism has been leading this transformation.
Today, Prism works with three of the five largest fintech lenders in the United States and six of the ten largest digital banks. Prism’s technology is distributed through leading financial data and credit infrastructure providers like Equifax, Plaid, and LexisNexis. And we’re currently working with several of the country’s largest traditional banks to implement cash flow underwriting for millions more consumers and small businesses.
Our API volume tells the story of that widespread adoption. Over the past two years, the number of API requests banks and lenders have made for Prism solutions has increased more than 100x, representing an average compounded growth rate of more than 20% per month for two consecutive years. There is no better measure of how quickly cash flow underwriting has moved from the margins into the mainstream of lending.
These days, new models can be built faster than ever. Trust is a different story.
The first CashScore® model was deployed for consumer credit decisioning by an FDIC-regulated financial institution in 2018. In the years since, it has been tested and used across hundreds of lending portfolios, comprising tens of billions of dollars in loan originations, and has undergone extensive model validation, compliance and regulatory audits, capital markets scrutiny, and independent fair lending testing.
That track record is difficult to replicate. It has earned CashScore the confidence of lenders, bank partners, regulators, and capital markets participants.
With that foundation, we believe that CashScore is now the most widely adopted cash flow-based credit score in North America.
But what matters most isn’t how many scores we produce. It’s what better information makes possible.
At Synchrony, cash flow underwriting helped enable nearly 50,000 incremental approvals in 2025 for consumers who otherwise would have been declined. Synchrony has said it expects to open between 150,000 and 250,000 new accounts through cash flow underwriting this year, with these customers performing in line with its broader portfolio and within target credit risk.
These aren’t just abstract decisions. Behind them are people gaining access to credit they would otherwise have been denied, because their lender now sees a more complete picture of their creditworthiness.
That is the reason we built Prism.
Today, I’m excited to announce $20 million in funding to accelerate our next phase of growth.
Prism’s Series A round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from FINTOP, Core VC, Obvious Ventures, 1st & Main Growth Partners, and Mana Ventures. Together with the $5 million seed round we announced in 2023, Prism has now raised more than $25 million.
The funding is an important milestone. But the bigger story is why this technology has become so important, and why adoption is accelerating now.
Consumers’ financial lives are changing. Traditional credit reports can’t keep up.
The gap between traditional credit reports and financial reality continues to widen.
The way people earn is changing, with gig work, self-employment, side businesses, and multiple income sources becoming increasingly important to household finances. The Federal Reserve has said that a stunning 40% of Americans’ personal income now comes from non-wage sources. Yet much of the financial system still evaluates income as though everyone receives a single paycheck from a single employer.
Financial pressure is changing how people manage money: two consumers with identical credit scores may be moving in opposite directions, one building savings and the other drawing down reserves to cover rising costs. That difference shows up in cash flow data long before it shows up in a traditional credit score.
The way people borrow is changing rapidly as well. Buy Now, Pay Later, cash advances, Earned Wage Access, and new financial products arriving every year are creating obligations that traditional underwriting cannot see.
A credit system built around a fixed set of reporting categories will struggle to keep up. Cash flow intelligence offers a fundamentally different approach: from static to dynamic, from periodic to real-time, and from rigid data categories to AI-powered understanding of financial behavior.
AI unlocks a new generation of financial intelligence.
Extracting sophisticated intelligence for regulated decision-making from raw bank transactions is an enormous technical challenge. Memo descriptions are inconsistent, merchants appear under many names, payment rails evolve constantly, and the same text can mean very different things depending on context. Turning that messy data into accurate, predictive, and explainable credit intelligence requires purpose-built technology, years of experience with real-world financial information, vast amounts of training data, and continuous detection of new transaction patterns.
We’ve spent the last decade solving this problem for banks and lenders. Now, new AI capabilities are making our cash flow solutions more powerful than ever before.
Today, we’re introducing REFRACT™, a new AI-powered transaction categorization engine trained on Prism’s proprietary dataset of more than 30 billion bank transactions. REFRACT, the Real-time Engine For Recognizing, Analyzing, and Categorizing Transactions, is the foundation underlying our forthcoming generation of scores and analytics, and the reason Prism’s products can see financial behaviors and obligations that conventional systems miss.
Unlike standard categorization that assigns labels from merchant names or keywords alone, REFRACT’s independent consumer and commercial models infer the financial purpose of transactions with high precision. By connecting contextual clues, REFRACT distinguishes transactions that look alike on a bank statement but represent fundamentally different financial activities. For example, it can discern earnings from borrowed funds, refunds from income, and purchases from transfers, even when the same payment platform is involved.
In benchmark testing, REFRACT delivers double-digit percentage gains in categorization accuracy over Prism’s previous generation of models, enabling even more predictive cash flow intelligence.
REFRACT is also data-source independent. It is compatible with data from any open banking aggregator, financial institutions’ own deposit accounts, and PDF statements across the United States and Canada.
As financial behavior evolves, REFRACT’s AI-powered monitoring identifies emerging transaction types and counterparties, including activity associated with new financial products such as prediction markets. These insights inform future model releases, continually expanding the range of financial behaviors REFRACT can recognize.
The next chapter starts now.
Prism’s new funding will allow us to build on this momentum. We’ll continue to invest heavily in our technology, proprietary AI infrastructure, and data science capabilities, including the development of a new generation of CashScore models built on REFRACT. We’ll continue expanding across consumer and small business lending, deepen our presence in the United States and Canada, and over time bring Prism’s technology to markets around the world. Most importantly, we’ll keep working with financial institutions to turn better financial data into better credit decisions and more financial opportunity for consumers and small businesses.
We’re grateful for the support of Story Ventures, FINTOP, Core VC, Obvious Ventures, 1st & Main Growth Partners, and Mana Ventures as we enter this next chapter.
Fifty years ago, credit scoring transformed lending by making the assessment of credit risk standardized and scalable. The next transformation will make it more individualized, more real-time, and more accurate.
We spent the last decade proving that cash flow underwriting works. The next decade is about putting it to work, improving how trillions of dollars of credit are allocated and expanding financial opportunity for tens of millions of consumers and small businesses.
Prism started this transformation. And we will continue to lead the way.