Fintechs have done a great job of fostering financial inclusion for underbanked consumers. Whether it’s 0% interest, faster approvals or flexible finance at point of checkout, the average consumer only needs to visit the app store for access to credit in minutes?

But, as debt is increasingly unbundled outside of banks, so too is data on liabilities…

To help you get a complete picture of your customer’s liabilities, we’ve added External payment sources to our Affordability API. This will surface repayments from a customer’s everyday transactions, whether it’s with payment providers or alternative lenders.

Use it to upgrade lending, personalise collections, help customers manage debt and more.

How it works

Any loan repayments detected from transaction accounts and everyday expenses will be tagged as External and aggregated with a customer’s liabilities across credit cards, mortgages and personal loans.

The endpoint will return data on the first and last repayment, how many repayments have been made, average and total repayment amounts as well as the details of each individual payment.

As an example, check out the below response for a customer with a BNPL account:

"external": [
    {
      "source": "afterpay",
      "payments": {
        "first": "2019-11-15",
        "last": "2019-11-15",
        "noOccurrences": 2,
        "amountAvg": "-146.50",
        "amountAvgMonthly": "-12.00",
        "total": "-146.50"
      },
      "changeHistory": [
        {
          "amount": "-146.50",
          "date": "2019-11-15",
          "source": "AFTERPAY MELBOURNE VI AUS Card xx3854 Value Date: 10/11/2019"
        },
        {
          ...
        }
      ]
    }
  ],

Want to test it out?

To help you get a better feel of what you can do with this new feature, our sandbox environment let’s you test it out with a user who has:

• Irregular income over the last 13 months;
• Gambling expenditure;
• BNPL activity and;
• Higher than expected expenditure in some categories e.g. alcohol.

Simply get started by registering for an account and creating an API key here.

As always we’ll be growing the list of supported institutions so you can build and scale for more customers. For the most up-to-date list of payment providers and alternative lenders we’ve added, check out our API docs.

We’re super excited to see how our partners use this feature to personalise lending and nurture customers into affordability!

Don’t have Affordability? Find out how you can get the complete financial picture of customers by getting in touch with the Basiq team.