Customer: Atlanticus

Atlanticus empowers better financial outcomes for everyday Americans by assisting bank partners with offering a suite of inclusive consumer credit products. Leveraging proprietary technology and advanced analytics, the company applies more than 30 years of operating experience across a broad range of offerings, servicing over 20 million customers and more than $50 billion in consumer loans. 

Guided by the principles of responsible credit decisioning, smart innovation, and expanding access to credit, Atlanticus is focused on helping consumers work towards a stronger financial future. Because traditional underwriting can miss creditworthy applicants and create friction in the application flow, the company turned to Plaid to power cash flow underwriting, incorporating real-time bank data with a smooth user experience. As a result, Atlanticus’s bank partners can responsibly say “yes” to more borrowers without increasing risk.

In this conversation, Matt Zalubowski, Chief Commercial Officer & Chief Marketing Officer at Atlanticus, explains why the company recommended that its bank partners adopt cash flow underwriting, what has changed for applicants, and how early results are shaping their strategy as they scale.

Plaid: Who are your core customers today, and what does "empowering better financial outcomes for everyday Americans" look like in practice?

Atlanticus: Atlanticus serves everyday Americans who are working to build stability and make meaningful progress toward their financial goals. With an average FICO score below 650, many of the customers we serve are overlooked or underserved by traditional financial institutions.

We view customers as more than a credit score. By leveraging deeper data insights and a more holistic underwriting approach, we extend access to responsible credit that can help them build credit history, manage unexpected expenses, and work toward long-term financial resilience.

Plaid: What was breaking down in your pre-Plaid underwriting and application experience? Where were you losing good applicants?

Atlanticus: Atlanticus has always looked for ways to improve the credit models utilized by our bank partners because creditworthy applicants, whose bureau profiles alone do not fully reflect their financial stability, particularly thin-file and subprime consumers, for whom backward-looking scores can understate true creditworthiness, can erroneously be overlooked.

By integrating Plaid, there is the ability to move beyond static bureau data and incorporate verified income and cash flow analytics directly into decisioning models. This enables our bank partners to responsibly extend credit to consumers who may have previously been declined while maintaining disciplined risk management standards. 

Equally important, the Plaid experience is designed to be seamless within the application flow, with just a few steps and an intuitive interface. This helps reduce friction and build trust from the outset. For subprime consumers accustomed to friction and rejection, this shift materially improves confidence and engagement.

Plaid: How do you define "cash flow underwriting" internally, and how does cash flow data add the most value versus traditional bureau-based decisioning?

Atlanticus: At Atlanticus, cash flow underwriting is a structured re-evaluation of applicants who fall outside traditional bureau-based approval thresholds but may demonstrate strong repayment capacity. It’s an intentional layer of incremental insight designed to separate structural credit risk from data limitations.

Traditional bureau data captures historical performance but does not always reflect current income stability, liquidity, or improving behavior. Cash flow data adds value to that gap. By analyzing verified income deposits, expense patterns, residual cash flow, and account stability, we gain a real-time view of a consumer’s ability to manage obligations today. This helps reduce false negatives and supports responsibly expanding access to credit while maintaining risk discipline.

Plaid: What impact has Plaid had on the applicant experience and overall performance?

Atlanticus: Since launching Plaid, we’ve seen meaningful improvements in both applicant experience and underwriting outcomes. Plaid helps us move quickly into a clearer, more transparent evaluation of an applicant’s full financial picture, creating a smoother onboarding experience for consumers while strengthening our bank partners’ ability to make confident decisions. With Layer, in particular, the whole process takes as little as 15 seconds, and requires nothing more than a phone number from applicants already in the Plaid Network.  

When it comes to conversion, close to 70% of applicants who start the bank linking flow through Plaid complete it. This is the highest rate we’ve seen among the providers we’ve used. Among applicants who successfully complete the bank-linking process, our bank partners are able to approve approximately 27% more applicants than would have been approved using traditional bureau data alone.

Plaid: Which assets, data points or insights have been most useful for your cash flow underwriting?

Atlanticus: The most valuable inputs are those that improve visibility into repayment capacity and financial stability. These include verified income streams, residual cash flow analysis, expense pattern recognition, and account stability indicators. Thanks to the reliability and breadth of the Plaid network, this data is now easy to obtain and provides a high level of confidence in the information used to support underwriting decisions.

Plaid: How did you make sure cash flow underwriting approvals didn’t increase risk? What metrics did you track and what stayed steady (or improved) after launch?

Atlanticus: Risk control was foundational. We did not treat cash flow as a replacement for bureau data, but as an incremental decisioning layer subject to the same validation rigor as any underwriting enhancement.

We started with smaller volumes and a simple cash flow policy to observe performance, then refine over time. Post-launch, we closely monitored completion rate, approval rate, and delinquency rate. We’re optimizing our policy and expect our risk-adjusted return to be fully in line with expectations as we scale.

Plaid: Did cash flow data make your underwriting model more accurate? If yes, what’s the clearest proof point and how did it change your approval rules, pricing, or credit limits?

Atlanticus: Early results suggest cash flow data provides additional insights that help differentiate applicants with similar credit scores but different repayment capacity. We see this in marginal score bands, where verified income and residual cash flow have reduced false declines while keeping loss rates within target ranges. This has allowed our bank partners to selectively approve more applicants and make more informed credit decisions using additional underwriting information, thereby improving precision without loosening risk standards.

Plaid: As you expand Plaid into the Imagine® Visa® Credit Card* application, or other applications, what are your main goals and what do you hope to explore with Plaid in the future?

Atlanticus: Our primary goal is to allow our bank partners to scale cash flow-enhanced underwriting across a larger, more diverse applicant base while maintaining disciplined risk performance.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on deeper integration of cash flow insights across the customer lifecycle, not just at origination. That includes optimizing line assignments, refining pricing precision, exploring proactive credit line management, and leveraging real-time financial signals that allow our bank partners to better support customers over time. Ultimately, we want to continue working with Plaid to embed cash flow intelligence as a core underwriting and portfolio management capability across general purpose credit cards.

*The Imagine® Visa® Credit Card is issued by WebBank.