Lenders have difficulty performing credit underwriting for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) when considering commercial loans, credit cards and trade finance. Typically, a bank has relevant information in more than one internal system, and they often need to retrieve additional information from multiple third parties that use disparate systems.

A further complication involves existing credit risk models. They often generate imprecise credit decisions because of skewed data and biased algorithms that negatively impact low-income and minority groups.

It is common for the final decision on any SMB’s credit worthiness to be made manually, up to three weeks after an application has been received.

Worth AI began building risk management and underwriting technology late in 2023 to automate credit decisions for SMBs. The company’s AI-based engine incorporates more than 1,000 data points from traditional and nontraditional sources. It delivers a credit risk score in seconds. And Worth says it eliminates bias in real time.

Baseline data on 42 million small and midsized businesses are included in the Worth AI model. Information is updated daily. Merchants can be onboarded in 2½ minutes.

Lenders with access to the Worth AI platform can be given daily updates on their existing SMB customers to gain the earliest awareness of potential risks.

Worth AI provides a full front-end onboarding capability that handles know your customer (KYC) and identity verification (IDV) as well as a case management platform. A dashboard and reporting area, currently in beta testing, will provide visibility into portfolios.

Lenders can license a full platform, access modules via APIs or just sign on to receive a score. Their SMB customers can be given a Worth score to help them understand their financial health and stability.

Credit card issuers can use Worth AI to assess their exposure to losses from cardholders in their existing portfolios as well as to identify businesses that are candidates for credit line increases.

INTERVIEWED FOR THIS ARTICLE Sal Rehmetullah is Co-Chief Executive Officer at Worth AI in Orlando, Florida, sal@worthai.com, www.worthai.com.