SentiLink, the leading provider of innovative identity, fraud, and risk solutions, announced plans to launch Repute, a consumer reporting agency offering a new suite of credit products. Its first offering, the Repute Score for Alternative Finance, will be an FCRA-actionable credit score that enables alternative finance lenders to approve or decline leads before paying for a specialty bureau pull.

Lenders that buy leads at volume pay for a specialty bureau report on most of them, resulting in significant expense that could be avoided if better intelligence was available sooner in the funnel. The Repute Score sits in front of that call. Lenders can approve the lowest-risk leads and decline the highest-risk leads on the Repute Score alone, then send only the uncertain middle to the bureau. Because the score is FCRA-actionable, lenders can take adverse action on it directly.

In a retrospective study using one design partner's historical lead funnel, the Repute Score would have enabled the partner to:

• Materially reduce specialty bureau calls by decisioning on ~60% of leads at the Repute step.
• Better isolate nonpayment risk: bureau-approved leads scored as highest-risk by Repute were nearly 2x as likely to early default than the portfolio baseline.
• Fund more good leads: bureau-rejected leads scored as lowest-risk by Repute charged off nearly 20% less often than the portfolio baseline when funded by other lenders.

"All of us at SentiLink are proud to introduce Repute," said Naftali Harris, CEO and co-founder, SentiLink. "We are grateful to our early design partners for their trust in us and excited to help them and the rest of the industry better assess risk and improve their application funnels. It's time for new credit signals and more predictive data in the alternative finance market and beyond."

The Repute Score will be built only on inquiry and tradeline data furnished by participating lenders, including how loans perform after funding. It does not use data from SentiLink's fraud products, and lenders do not need any other SentiLink product to use it.