The ClearScore Group, a leading global financial services marketplace group, announces today a new partnership with alternative lender Plend. Unlike traditional loans providers, Plend looks beyond credit scores to assess risk and affordability, and Plend loans will now be available on the ClearScore UK consumer marketplace. As well as the marketplace, Plend will also be using the ClearScore Group’s open banking services arm ‘D•One’ for comprehensive and specialised open banking connectivity and transaction categorisation intelligence. This allows Plend to consume applicant transaction data via open banking to perform a real-world assessment of affordability. Not only does this support responsible lending, but also provides consumers who have impaired or limited credit histories with access to credit options they might otherwise have missed out on. 

Now in its ninth year and with 14m users in the UK, The ClearScore Group includes both the ClearScore data-driven, online marketplace retailing financial services products, and D•One – its fast-growing open banking services provider. The combination of both an open banking technology provider and a distribution channel in the form of a consumer-facing financial services marketplace allows lenders such as Plend to include transaction data in their lending decisions, thus reaching a large audience of consumers switched on to financial services products.

Justin Basini, ClearScore Group CEO and Co-founder, said: “We welcome Plend on board as a forward-thinking and data-driven alternative lender that is the perfect fit for our users. We are seeing more consumers unlocking the power of open banking and lenders increasingly recognise the need to make a truer and fairer assessment of how much credit a consumer can realistically afford to repay. Our highly scalable digital platform and proprietary datasets help translate open banking into smarter decisions, and thereby open new lines of credit that people would not otherwise have had access to.”

James Pursaill, CTO & Co-Founder at Plend, said: “We’re on a mission to give more people the affordable loan they deserve, and credit assessments powered by open banking are the way to make that a reality. We’re pleased to partner with the ClearScore marketplace for extensive reach, and with D•One for its comprehensive transaction categorisation intelligence which helps us accurately and fairly assess potential borrowers.”

D•One’s Open Banking services consists of two products that clients can use independently or in combination: the first, ‘ConnectionOne’, provides the most comprehensive set of open banking connections in the market to over 50 financial institutions. ConnectionOne 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 ‘CategoryOne’, an advanced transaction categorisation engine which allows clients to classify and analyse bank account transactions. CategoryOne has been developed over the past decade and has benefited from well over 5 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 better outcomes for lenders and borrowers.