Plaid LendScore: Unlocking insights never used before in credit scoring

Michelle Young
Product Lead

The data that makes up someone’s full financial picture is more complex than ever before. Income is more variable, expenses fluctuate, and financial activity is spread across a growing number of platforms. But why is so much of that data still missing from credit decisions?

That’s why we’re introducing Plaid LendScore, a first-of-its-kind credit risk score that uses real-time cash flow data and unique account connection insights from the Plaid Network to give lenders an up-to-date view of borrower risk. With nearly 1 million connections made daily, Plaid’s network provides differentiated signals about a borrower's financial health that can power market-leading predictive models.

Delivered through our consumer reporting agency, LendScore is a smarter way to assess risk and offers consumers the chance to share a more complete picture of their financial lives, helping expand access to credit.

A new dimension of credit risk scoring

Traditional credit scores still matter, but they rely on historical data and miss what’s happening right now in a borrower’s financial life. Lenders increasingly see them as just one part of the picture. LendScore takes a fundamentally different approach to evaluating credit risk by leveraging cash flow insights, income patterns, and financial account connections to reveal a borrower’s real-time financial story. This makes LendScore suitable to use alongside traditional scores to enhance credit decisioning. 

Our first model, LS1, is trained on a dataset of nearly one billion transactions to predict the likelihood of default in 12 months for unsecured loans. Additionally, we partnered with FairPlay, a provider of advanced AI fairness techniques used by banks and fintechs, to complete an independent assessment of our model.

After a borrower consents to share their bank account data via Plaid Link, lenders can call our API to receive a score from 1–99, along with adverse action reason codes to support FCRA and ECOA compliance.

Turn insights into real-world impact

We built LendScore in close partnership with unsecured lenders, which helped shape the attributes we prioritized, the structure of our reason codes, and how we measured model performance. For those lenders, we generated millions of scores and delivered a 25% lift in predictive performance compared to traditional credit data alone.

Additionally, we drove a 10–20% relative risk reduction for subprime and near-prime borrowers without reducing originations. This could save personal lenders more than $1 billion in credit losses and reduce the average APR for borrowers by 3 percentage points.

What makes LendScore different

LendScore isn’t just another model—it gives lenders the tools to assess creditworthiness with greater precision, speed, and context than ever before. Here’s how:

Insights into financial behaviors to improve risk prediction

LendScore is the only score in the market that incorporates network insights, which provides context on the types of apps someone is connected to on the Plaid Network, within a certain time period, and how long they’re active on each service. With over 150 million people who have linked their accounts to 7,000+ apps and services, the model picks up early indicators of changing financial habits and emerging risk.

For example, millions of people rely on earned wage access apps to bridge the gap between paychecks and avoid overdrafts. When used occasionally, they can be a helpful financial tool. But borrowers using four or more at once are 22% more likely to default on a loan.

Comprehensive open banking data for holistic financial visibility

The Plaid Network sees nearly 1 million daily connections across checking, savings, investment, and loan accounts. This gives our scoring model the breadth to capture a borrower’s complete financial life and the depth to analyze key signals like balance trends, income stability, and recurring expenses. All of these data points are distilled into an actionable risk score, helping lenders move from insight to decision faster.

Seamless user experiences that drive conversion

Used by 1 in 2 U.S. bank account holders, our familiar and secure account linking experience delivers conversion rates up to 80% in lending flows—far exceeding industry averages. Built-in returning user experiences make it faster and safer to connect accounts, reducing friction and boosting conversion even further.

A new era of open banking-driven lending

We believe in an open, connected financial system that fuels innovation and expands responsible credit access. Lenders now have access to a variety of alternative data scores in the market, which enables them to choose one or multiple that best aligns with their credit strategy. Unsecured lenders can use Plaid's score to meet their full underwriting needs or alongside existing credit scores to supplement risk processes.

As open banking continues to scale in the U.S., credit scoring will only get smarter. We’ll continue evolving our model to reflect how borrower behavior changes, so you can stay one step ahead of risk.

Get started with LendScore

LendScore is now available in beta to help lenders improve decision making and simplify underwriting workflows. To learn more, contact your Plaid account team or join the waitlist.