UPDATE: Aro no longer offers myfreedom or the Fusion Score. Our fintech platform now processes Open Banking data alongside your credit score data in real-time within our eligibility check. This allows us to more accurately pinpoint which credit offers are right for you.
Last week, we won the Excellence in Open Banking – Creditor award at the prestigious Credit Awards 2020. This was in recognition of our latest venture – myfreedom and the Fusion Score. Since launching this year, we’ve seen an incredible uptake from customers whose credit score is an unfair reflection of whether they can afford to borrow money. By utilising Open Banking, we can generate their Fusion Score – a metric that gives a more accurate representation of their financial situation.
Excellence in Open Banking
Open Banking was originally set up by the government to generate more competition in the financial services sector. A Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated technology; Open Banking allows individuals to share their bank transaction data with other licenced organisations, like us. Ultimately, as a customer this gives you more power, allowing you to use your data to your advantage whenever you need to.
Here at Aro, we’ve harnessed this capability to try to secure you better loan offers in the form of lower APRs, or a new offer that would have previously been out of reach.
When you sign up to myfreedom, you’ll be asked to link to your main bank account using Open Banking. This is a safe and secure way to provide us with your bank transaction data which we’ll then use to generate your Fusion Score. We won’t be able to affect or move your money in any way, it’ll just give us read-only access to get the information we need.
Top tip: When linking your bank account, it’s important you link the account your main income is paid into. You can also link multiple accounts that you use frequently to improve your chances of getting a better rate.
Once you’ve got your Fusion Score, we can pass this on to our lenders to try to get you a better offer.
Putting our customers first
We set up myfreedom and the Fusion Score to make the credit application process fairer for more people. Traditionally, when you check your eligibility for credit, your credit score (and the information you provide in your application) is used to determine whether you’ll be made an offer.
However, a credit score is only a summary of your credit history. It doesn’t take into account your income, rent payments, subscriptions or day-to-day transactions.
If you’re fairly new to the world of credit, haven’t been in the UK for long, or have been recently impacted by a life event such as a divorce, this can be reflected negatively in your credit score. Alternatively, your credit score could be recovering from a missed payment five years ago. Although your finances may be well on the road to recovery, this might not be apparent in your credit file.
The Fusion Score brings things like proof of income and your day-to-day transactions into the mix. Giving lenders – and you – a more complete picture of your financial situation, you can be confident that your credit offers are a fair reflection of your finances.
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