FICO Scores Often Mean No. Meet The Scientists Making It Say Yes, Sanjiv Das – President Pagaya

When it comes to the financial industry the word “NO” seems like their favorite response—many banks have VP’s of No! To a promising borrower who gets denied due to a hard-set credit model, or a working parent who has a steady income but a short credit history, banks are likely to say no to both of their loan requests. One of the ways to resolve this is rebooting how FICO scores work—but good luck getting the big dog banks to learn a new system. Sanjiv Das, the co-founder and president of Pagaya, is rebooting all of it. They are not changing how FICO scores work, but the loan system as a whole. Pagaya is an AI-powered underwriting platform connecting lending partners, like VISA, Master Card, US Bank, Ally, and SoFI with a network of over 130 institutional investors. Founded in Israel and taken public on the NASDAQ, Pagaya has optimized AI to underwrite “second-look” loans—the kind traditional lenders might decline—by partnering with financial institutions that want to expand credit access without all of risk.The billion-dollar company has experienced massive growth, evaluated over $2.6T in loan applications and generated $32B in new credit across millions of consumers through point-of-sale, personal, and auto loans. That’s a lot of data! With hundreds of data scientists, they continue to lead the industry, expanding their platform capabilities, that go beyond the old traditional FICA score systems—and they just launched a new $1 billion POS lending program.Sanjiv explains it all, from their underwriting engine designed to see people not just profiles to the immense power AI has on this industry and why this venture was worth leaving retirement for.