D•One, the open banking business unit from The ClearScore Group, has announced a partnership with Abound to provide open banking connectivity and transaction categorisation intelligence.

London-based credit technology company Abound, one of the UK’s foremost alternative data-driven lenders, is pioneering the use of open banking and AI in consumer lending. Abound will take open banking data for prospective borrowers from D•One so that it can use that data to assess affordability for ClearScore users as soon as they search for a loan. 

D•One supplies Abound with bank transaction data at the beginning of customers' loan searches. This data is then processed by Abound’s AI credit engine, Render, to make more informed decisions, enabling broader access to affordable loans while significantly reducing credit risk.

Tim Kelleway, Director at D•One, said: “Open banking helps assess borrower risk more fairly, which is a positive innovation for the credit market. Abound is one of the most advanced lenders in the UK in terms of leveraging open banking data to drive greater financial inclusion. As Abound scales in the UK it is drawing on D•One’s specialist expertise in transaction categorisation to help make affordability assessments in milli-seconds.”

Michele He, Co-Founder and COO at Abound, said: “Traditional lenders are still relying on credit scores, which is a limited technology that excludes many low-risk people simply because they are credit invisible. At Abound we see open banking as a unique opportunity to transform lending and we have proved that this technology can help us both serve more people and improve credit performance. D•One and ClearScore align perfectly with our mission to expand access to affordable loans.”

D•One provides the most comprehensive suite of Open Banking connectivity in the UK and has an advanced deterministic categorisation model developed over 12 years and with over 7 billion transactions. Lenders such as Abound, Zopa, Plend and Salad Money can leverage these capabilities both on and off the ClearScore platform. D•One works seamlessly in a lender’s own digital estate as well as in ClearScore’s own credit marketplace.

D•One operates a modern and fully cloud-based tech stack with micro-services architecture for maximum speed and reliability. Its open banking connection and categorisation services are available to lenders and/or introducer partners to support credit brokering and application processes across the market - delivering consistent functionality and decisioning solutions across all channels.