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Since Synchrony Financial adopted cashflow underwriting in its credit-decisioning model, it was able to approve nearly 50,000 customers in 2025 who otherwise would have been declined. Next year, the bank anticipates that number could increase to 150,000 customers.
Cashflow underwriting—analyzing borrowers' income and expenses with their consent—added another tool to the Synchrony PRISM underwriting model that incorporates data not included in the major credit bureaus' scores.
The bank added more than 20 million new accounts overall and generated more than $182 billion in sales for its retail partners, according to Brian Doubles, president and CEO at Synchrony. He added that underlying the growth is PRISM's analysis of 9,000 datapoints from its more than 70 million customers and 500,000 partner locations that provide "more precise, inclusive and responsible approvals in seconds while staying within long-term credit performance targets."
PRISM's richer customer profiles improve the bank's understanding of borrowers' creditworthiness. PRISM also provides important insights, including that loans of customers consenting to cashflow analysis perform significantly better than credit-bureau scores would indicate, and subprime borrowers approved for higher credit lines prioritize repaying that debt.
"From a consumer-behavior standpoint, it changes their payment hierarchy because we're extending them more credit and they value the card more," said Max Axler, Synchrony's chief credit officer who has guided PRISM since 2018.
Synchrony uses PRISM in lending-related decisions across the bank in areas such as diverse collections, identity, account management, modeling and governance. Lending includes the private-label credit cards it offers through retailers, including Walmart, Amazon and PayPal. Incorporating customers' data into PRISM is an analytical credit issue, Axler said, while pulling and digesting thousands of data points for each credit approval, in six seconds or less, is a major operational and technological challenge.
Those challenges are tackled by more than 20 cross functional, PRISM-dedicated agile teams, each mixing credit and technology experts. They develop and continually improve the proprietary system, identifying potentially new features, working out technical details, determining the overall impact, and conducting the implementation and execution.
"Every three months the teams review what they've done and prioritize what they'll work on for the next three months," said Axler, an executive at the lender since before it was spun off from General Electric in 2014.
Its alternative data gave Synchrony an early read on the COVID pandemic's impact on borrowers, especially subprime borrowers whose creditworthiness significantly improved due to federal stimulus-check relief. Cashflow analysis provides more insight into such changes and helps the bank identify fraud, such "credit washing" schemes borrowers are increasingly using to improve their credit scores.
Leveraging consented cashflow analysis was a first step in PRISM 2.0. Additional capabilities, Axler said, include allowing downpayments to enable larger credits than PRISM scores indicate, and utilizing consumers' behavioral signals to improve approvals and the customer experience.
"If the applicant is willing to sign up for autopay, they perform roughly 20 points better than their credit score would indicate," Axler said. "Half the battle is getting people not to forget to pay us."
