The company provides public benchmarks for free to build trust. It monetizes by selling private benchmarking services and subscription-based enterprise reports, ensuring AI labs cannot pay for better public scores and thus maintaining objectivity.

By eliminating outdated constraints like the six-month activity rule and incorporating time-series data and alternative inputs like rent payments, modern credit scoring models can assess millions of creditworthy individuals, such as military personnel or young people, who were previously unscorable.

Affirm's CEO suggests competitors don't report payment data to credit bureaus as a business strategy. By keeping delinquencies off the 'permanent record,' they can implicitly encourage late payments, from which they profit via fees. Affirm, having no late fees, advocates for full reporting.

To maintain independence and trust, their public benchmarks are free and cannot be influenced by payments. The company generates revenue by selling detailed reports and insight subscriptions to enterprises, and by conducting private, custom benchmarking for AI companies, separating their public good from their commercial offerings.

Read AI discovered that the longer a user stays on the free plan, the more likely they are to eventually pay. By allowing users to build a large personal data archive for free, the value of upgrading to access and query that history becomes a powerful, self-created incentive.

With many "Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) services not reporting to credit bureaus, lenders face "stacking" risk where consumers take on invisible debt. To get a holistic view, lenders are increasingly incorporating cash flow data, like checking account trends, into their underwriting processes.

The credit repair industry is notoriously scammy and difficult for consumers to navigate. An AI-powered ChatGPT app could provide a transparent, automated alternative by connecting to credit bureaus, offering dispute templates, and simulating score improvements. This model can be applied to other opaque consumer service industries.

A key heuristic for identifying low-value "snake oil" AI products is an immediate paywall. If an AI tool is genuinely powerful and automated, it should offer a generous free tier or credits to demonstrate value (like ChatGPT or Suno). Forcing a credit card upfront suggests the product can't stand on its own and needs to lock in revenue before its lack of utility is discovered.

Instead of using AI to score consumers, Experian applies it to governance. AI systems monitor financial models for 'drift'—when outcomes deviate from predictions—and alert human overseers to the specific variables causing the issue, ensuring fairness and regulatory compliance.