In the credit card world, underwriting is one of the most essential pieces to understanding not only how credit works, but also who has access to it. Despite its importance, most people don’t know what underwriting is or how it affects their lives, and most companies that want to offer credit don’t use underwriting that would maximize their potential cardholder base.

At its most basic, underwriting is all about determining risk and building trust with applicants. Underwriting allows creditors to examine applicants’ financial backgrounds and decide whether or not to offer them credit based off that information. It’s something Deserve executes directly with consumer credit card applications like the Deserve Digital First Card, but it’s also something we help other businesses do when building their own credit card programs.

We revolutionized underwriting because the traditional model no longer suits the modern world.

In traditional banking, underwriting can be highly inefficient. Underwriting development can take a long time, and once it’s deployed, it’s very susceptible to bugs and code errors that undermine efficiency and consumer trust. It’s also built on COBOL, an archaic coding language that operates on slow-moving software...but don’t get us started on COBOL.

‍Traditional underwriting can also be unintentionally exclusionary. It tends to focus solely on standard data like credit scores, which don’t always tell the whole story of an applicant’s financial background. What if an applicant missed some car payments three years ago, but has since gotten their finances in order? Or what if an applicant is young, or international, and has little-to-no credit history? They might have been pretty good credit consumers, but in the old model, they often get left behind.

Luckily, with Deserve’s modern API-driven underwriting engine, there’s another way.

Developed by our team of world-class data scientists, and approved by our issuing banks, the Deserve Underwriting Engine is built for today’s world, utilizing state-of-the-art algorithms. With our interactive UI, you can determine if you want to examine standard financial attributes such as credit files, credit scores, and income, as well as up to 1,500 more attributes, such as cash flow underwriting. With cash flow underwriting, you can examine how well applicants pay their bills on time, which allows you to be more informed of your applicants’ financial situations. This leads to optimal decisioning: more great customers and fewer defaults.

The Deserve Underwriting Engine is also quick and easy to implement, enabling companies to easily customize and launch their underwriting flows in under 10 minutes. Like we said: easy.

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Deserve Digital First Card and Deserve EDU Card are issued by Celtic Bank, a Utah-Chartered Industrial Bank, Member FDIC.