The Shift That Drove Our 10× Growth in 2025

In 2025, one shift in lending explained almost all of our growth:

Credit risk decisions became continuous.

Our platform now processes over 95 million credit decisions per month, marking the industry’s departure from its legacy risk playbook. 

For decades, underwriting relied on point-in-time snapshots of creditworthiness: a credit pull at application, a credit score that aged immediately. Lenders made these decisions as if a borrower’s financial situation were static.

That approach no longer holds as fintech lenders win market share by delivering the instant approvals and payments borrowers now expect. Success in this environment depends on visibility into a borrower’s financial situation, delivered continuously and at massive speed and scale.

Lenders applied cashflow analytics to solve diverse business challenges, driving unique results across several key value propositions:

• Growth: 80% increase in approval rates with 30% lower delinquency.
• Profitability: Over 200% increase in net revenue.
• Stability: 45% decrease in default rates.
• Efficiency: 50% reduction in ACH return rates.

3 Ways Continuous Risk Went Mainstream in 2025

1. Lenders applied real-time analytics across the entire lifecycle

Lenders prioritizing growth used cashflow analytics continuously and throughout the borrower lifecycle. After the initial approval, they used real time data to:

• Monitor income timing to schedule repayments,
• Detect spending changes that signal liquidity stress,
• Adjust credit limits based on real time activity.

Case in point: Super.com increased cash advance amounts for their repeat users by customizing our Cash Advance Score, reducing defaults by 20% at the same time.

Providers adopting this approach require pay date predictions with over 93% accuracy and 99% of API responses in under 3 seconds. As these capabilities became table stakes, those who use cashflow analytics exclusively for underwriting began to fall behind as continuous lifecycle monitoring becomes the industry standard.

2. Product-specific risk scores unlocked new credit decisions

One-size-fits-all scores are too blunt for continuous risk assessment. A cash advance behaves differently than a personal loan or a credit card. These distinctions are critical for real-time decisions. 

As a result, credit and cash advance providers are increasingly adopting product-specific risk scores trained on live performance data. This allows them to evaluate users more precisely on a given product’s terms.

The results of adding product-specific scores include:

• Cash Advance Score: providers increased number of advances by nearly 4x while improving repayment rates by 30%,
• Small Dollar Loan Score: providers nearly doubled their net revenue while reducing defaults by 45%,
• Personal Loan Score: providers increased approvals by 10% while reducing defaults by 54%. 

Case in point: Fizz safely approved more thin-file students by using Pave’s Credit Card Risk Score to better capture the specific repayment dynamics generic models miss. 

3. ACH returns reduced when treated as a continuous risk problem

The big mistake in the static era was treating the ACH payment as only a payment ops task. In the era of continuous risk, loan repayment is the final phase of the risk decision cycle. 

Lenders use our ACH Risk Score to evaluate repayment capacity in real time based on a borrower’s ability to repay. This precision transforms payments into a strategic advantage:

• Eliminate the Blind Attempt: Predict repayment success with surgical precision to eliminate NSF-related failures.
• Slash Payment Costs: Confidently shift volume from expensive debit rails to low-cost ACH, and reduce reliance on expensive scores, without increasing payment failure rates.

The Impact: One lender found Pave’s ACH Risk Score would improve their return rate by 25% while simultaneously increasing ACH usage 7x. This reflects what ACH payments look like when lenders manage ACH as a risk problem.

‍

What This Sets Up in 2026

Several changes are now inevitable:

1. Credit risk decisions extend beyond origination into ongoing lifecycle moments
2. Bank transaction data is prioritized as a cost-effective screening layer to protect against rising data costs,
3. Risk evaluation continues to move toward product-specific views of borrower behavior

These changes redefine how credit risk is assessed, priced, and monitored.

The open question heading into 2026 is: how much of today’s credit stack is designed to support decisions that happen continuously, not just at origination? 

If you are pressure testing how your credit stack holds up against these shifts, we are happy to compare notes and share what we are seeing across the market.

‍