News Pod #33 - Experian Launches a Cash Flow Bureau, Plus Other News From This Week

Great.

So story one, uh, and the one we'll come back to later, as you mentioned, is on October 6th, Experian announced Experian Cash Flow Data Bureau Inc. It's a new consumer reporting agency operating under the FCRA, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, um, and it's built on top of bank account data that the consumer permissions at the point of application.

You know, Experian's own analysis says that pairing cash flow with credit data lifts predictive performance by up to 40% and lets lenders approve up to 25% more without changing their risk tolerance.

You know, those are Experian's numbers, you know, quote, "up to," measured on targeted risk tiers.

You know, and the product list runs from consent and connectivity all the way down to combined credit and cash flow score.

So we'll unpack why the bureau part of it is the whole story in a few minutes.

Yeah.

I'm looking forward to digging into that one.

Uh, the next story, Mission Lane got their conditional OCC approval on September 25th for a credit card bank charter, um, which known as a CEBA charter, which covers card operations only.

Michelle Alt at the Claros Group, who worked on the application, told Banking Dive it's the first new OCC-regulated credit card bank in more than 20 years.

So the conditions, 35 million in paid in capital within 12 months and a tier-one leverage ratio of at least 11% for the first three years.

Uh, FDIC insurance is still pending.

Mission Lane says it serves almost three million customers and issues today through a TAB bank and web bank.

Uh, five months from application to a conditional yes, so this is one of the fastest ones we've seen get through.

And w- we covered, um, pretty recently, about a month or two ago, the wave of fintech applications that were coming in, um, for bank charter.

So we'll link to that in the show notes so you kinda see where this fits in, in, in the bigger picture.

Cool.

Third story, similar theme.

Uh, Upgrade applied for an industrial loan company charter with the FDIC in Nevada on October 12th.

Upgrade Bank would be a wholly owned FDIC-insured subsidiary, and Upgrade says it would sit alongside its existing bank partner relationships rather than replace them.

Virginia Varela, uh, previously at SoFi Bank, is the CEO.

Um, American Banker, um, is framing it, and framing it in a way that the regulators have approved nearly two dozen national trust charters since 2025, and the ILC pipeline is picking up more modestly, um, with FlexRent applying in July and Stellantis, GM, Ford, and Edward Jones approved earlier this year.

So our next story, it's so Citizens Bank, they're back in unsecured personal loans, this time through Pagaya.

So American Banker reported it on October 8th.

Citizens shut down its old personal loan platform in 2019.