Method Announces Portfolio Intelligence, Giving Lenders New Superpowers in Engaging With Borrowers After Origination

• Portfolio Intelligence continuously monitors borrowers’ full liability profile across more than 90 financial health signals, through direct connections to thousands of financial institutions.
• In an eight-week pilot with a major national mortgage provider, Method helped them realize a 40% increase in borrowers that qualified for debt-consolidation with a $4,000 decrease in avoidable interest for each borrower.

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Method, a financial connectivity platform supercharging innovation for leading fintechs and financial institutions, today announced the release of Portfolio Intelligence, a new product powering continuous post-origination monitoring for lenders. Where other attempts at offering this product have relied on periodic data pulls, manual batch uploads or customers maintaining account connections, Method’s Portfolio Intelligence monitors continuously. After a borrower consents at origination, no reauthentication is required and there is no manual overhead or gaps in coverage.

Portfolio Intelligence is targeted at any lender with an existing book of borrowers, including personal loan companies, mortgage servicers, credit unions and fintechs. Method’s platform delivers signals via webhook when a borrower passes a pre-defined threshold. It natively integrates with a lender’s own systems, and is an additive intelligence layer on top of their own data stack. It fills in a data blindspot for lenders by letting them see borrower behavior they’ve been missing, allowing them to surface the right offers to borrowers as they match key criteria and providing financial products to a greater number of people.

Method’s new Portfolio Intelligence product allows lenders to be strategically proactive with their customers in three key ways:

• Grow: two-thirds of borrowers take out another loan within 12 months of funding, but lenders usually find out about this after a borrower has gone somewhere else. Portfolio Intelligence can surface to lenders borrowers that have falling utilization rates, are paying down balances, and have payment behavior that is strengthening week-over-week, and recommend other financial products.
• Protect: with borrower consent, Method is able to monitor more than 90 financial health signals and pick up on meaningful changes in a borrower’s financial life and help them catch credit risk before it becomes a problem. Lenders can look at payment-to-minimum ratios, utilization trends over time, or borrowers that have turned off autopay, to catch behavior shifts while there’s still time to intervene.
• Re-engage: when a borrower is declined, they usually move on from a lender. With Portfolio Intelligence, a lender can stay engaged and reach back out with a personalized offer when they cross certain qualification criteria.

Method’s Portfolio Intelligence product is live with multiple existing customers who are seeing exciting benefits from having real time data intelligence connected to their existing loan book. In an eight-week pilot with a major mortgage provider, the provider saw a 40% increase in the number of borrowers who qualified for debt-consolidation and a 27% increase in HELOC-eligible borrowers. It helped new borrowers move from a median card APR of 24% to a mortgage rate near 7%, saving roughly $4,000 in avoidable interest per borrower.

“Current data and connectivity options in financial services are unreliable and don’t provide a comprehensive picture of liabilities, reducing the accuracy of targeting. We think our Portfolio Intelligence tool addresses both of these gaps,” said Jose Bethancourt, co-founder and CEO of Method. “We’re excited to launch Portfolio Intelligence because we’ve been hearing from our customers and prospects for a long time what a cost this is having on their business, leaving them blind to both the opportunities and risks within their existing customer-set.”

About Method

Method’s financial connectivity APIs access all of a user’s liabilities when signing up for a product, with a phone number and consumer consent and give them the choice of which to connect. Method connects with more than 20,000 financial institutions, powering continuous connectivity, real-time data and embedded payments, helping its customers streamline user acquisition, improve underwriting accuracy and increase line utilization. Method helps power solutions for over 100 fintechs and financial institutions, including SoFi, Figure, Bilt, Aven and Cleo. It has helped over 55 million people connect to their liabilities and 1-in-3 credit cards are connected to the Method ecosystem. To learn more, visit https://methodfi.com.