Salad Money Credit Where Its Due Report WEB SINGLES - Flipbook - Page 10
OPEN BANKING
AND CROUTON –
WHAT AND WHY?
“Everything we do comes down to affordability – we
have no interest in overburdening someone with a
loan they can’t afford to repay – and fairness, our
reason to exist. An applicant with a five year-old CCJ
which they have settled would be rejected by many
lenders. But for us, that satisfied CCJ, or in fact a CCJ
of two to six years old, often paints a useful part of
the picture of financial reliability and responsibility.”
Tim Rooney, CEO, Salad Money
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Salad Money has built a powerful
and fair credit affordability process
using Open Banking data. Applicants
understand that this means we
can access information about their
income and expenditure to make a
fair decision about whether they can
afford to repay the loan they want.
team, and is a powerful, everevolving categorisation, modelling
and decision-making engine. Crouton
also enables many of our social
purpose activities: helping applicants
(not only customers) access social
tariffs or access benefits they were
due but not claiming.
“Many credit options are simply notfit-for-purpose, which traps NHS and
public sector workers in harmful debt
cycles. Being able to say “yes”
to someone who needs a loan and
can afford to repay it means they’re
not going to a loan shark or a high
cost lender.
It means we can often lend money
to people excluded by CRA-powered
lenders for having no credit record, a
thin file, or a poor score. But with each
applicant having an average of 1,600
individual transactions spanning
the previous 12 months, how do we
categorise and analyse that data to
make a loan approval decision quickly
and accurately?
Tim Rooney, Salad CEO, says:
“Whether we say yes or no to an
applicant, Open Banking also means
we’re helping people identify the
benefits they were due but not
claiming, can highlight the social
tariffs they should be on and
even provide statistical insights to
journalists, academics and financial
inclusion campaigners.”
Salad’s in-house data team built our
machine learning model, Crouton,
which is bespoke to our social
enterprise. It’s been fine-tuned with
input from our customer service
“But people are ‘more than their
score’ which is why we launched
Salad. Our use of Open Banking
and machine learning enables us to
assess whether people can afford the
loan they apply for.
“Thousands of people delivering
frontline public services are excluded
by lenders using unfair, credit scorebased assessment. So they often turn
to toxic, high-cost or illegal lenders,
with figures showing a huge rise in
use of loan sharks even before the
cost of living crisis.
Credit Where It’s Due
