NEW YORK, NY — A new technology unveiled by RIBBIT at this week’s Fintech Nexus in New York City will help users better manage their finances.
RevealedAffordability is a bank account affordability solution powering a suite of non-permissioned and consumer-permissioned data products. They provide real-time, predictive assessments of income, spending behavior, and identity to inform smarter credit underwriting decisions.
Consumer cash flow cycles have been negatively impacted by the cessation of government pandemic stimulus and recent inflationary spending pressures. RIBBIT’s bank behavior data reveals that consumers are now 31% more likely to spend their entire bank account balance each week, despite a relatively steady earned income stream.
These cash flow cycle changes are pressuring consumers to increase financing activity by up to 22%, primarily from buy-now-pay-later, earned wage access, and short-term installment loans. Fraudulent bank accounts have also increased two-fold, with more than 750,000 fraud accounts using multiple identities in the last 30 days. The result is a 40% decrease in consumer “affordability” – the ability to pay financial obligations – which won’t appear in credit data for another 6-8 weeks.
RevealedAffordability leverages the recency and accuracy of bank data to deliver a more timely assessment of a consumer’s financial health than credit data alone. Thousands of bank behavior insights evaluate income stability, account ownership, and spending behavior to generate a more comprehensive appraisal of affordability.
RIBBIT’s data can be actioned anywhere in the application process no matter how the consumer chooses to provide their information, including KYC and identity verification, bank account enrollment, and permissioned online banking access. Financial service providers can now access a host of predictive bank behavior attributes, rules, and scores to accurately assess the 95% of U.S. households with a bank account.
“Bank behavior puts real-time income and affordability insights into the hands of financial service providers to make more informed decisions,” said RIBBIT CEO Shawn Princell. “We built our RevealedAffordability® technology to be deployed throughout the consumer journey – new applications, payments, account management, and collections – to enrich any use case with the power of bank data.”
In 2020, lenders admitted a lack of confidence in decisioning on 62% of the U.S. population due to the impact of COVID-19 and the inability of credit data to assess affordability during dramatic economic shifts. RIBBIT’s RevealedAffordability technology continuously learns from new behaviors to support adaptive decisioning in a changing economy. It was derived from a combination of a robust payments database and AI-enhanced cash flow analytics.