Overcoming Barriers in Traditional Credit Models
If you've ever felt frustrated by your credit score, you’re not alone. It’s a number that can feel out of sync with your real-life finances. For most people, access to credit is tied to credit reports that only tell one side of the story. That can feel like a pretty random way to judge how responsible you are with money. In fact, around 32 million American adults don’t show up in the traditional credit scoring system at all, including 7 million who are “credit invisible” with no credit history. (Source: Federal Reserve Board, “Alternative Data: Expanding Access to Credit,” 2025).
Traditional credit systems also skip over important signs of stability, like paying rent on time or keeping a steady job. The result? People get rejected for a few isolated events while their day-to-day money habits are ignored. Seeing how often that shut people out of credit is what led to the founding of Possible and the creation of our proprietary machine learning technology, PossibleAI.
From the start, the goal was to build a cash-flow underwriting system from the ground up, not just tune up an old one. PossibleAI is a predictive model that looks at real-time cash flow to give a more balanced basis for lending.
What is PossibleAI?
When you hear “PossibleAI,” you might be wondering: wait, does that mean you’re using ChatGPT? At Possible, ChatGPT is not what we are talking about when it comes to AI and our products. PossibleAI is the name of the cash flow underwriting engine we created in 2017 when we founded the company. It’s a type of machine learning that we use to understand your financial life, protect your information and offer more responsive support. At its core, PossibleAI enables us to make lending possible for more people every day.
Ditching Outdated Systems for Real-Time Truth
For over 35 years—since the first FICO score was introduced in 1989—lenders have relied on credit bureau data that updates slowly. Despite the rise of modern financial technology, the top 90 lenders still use these traditional FICO scores (Source: FICO, 2025). According to the CFPB, one late payment could follow you on your credit report for up to seven years, even if your finances today look very different.
PossibleAI takes a different approach. It looks at a more up-to-date picture of someone’s finances. Our models review bank transactions to understand income, spending patterns and how consistently bills get paid.
Why does this matter? For starters, it allows us to see the full picture. We can recognize positive habits that legacy models miss, such as steady employment and consistent utility payments.
It also helps us estimate the ability to repay based on what is happening now, instead of focusing on a single missed payment from years ago.
Ultimately, PossibleAI’s analysis helps ensure that when a customer needs financial help, Possible can look past the limitations of traditional FICO checks to help us make more timely, better-informed loan decisions.
Want to learn more? Check out The Technology Behind PossibleAI.
“Traditional credit models are built to serve almost everyone except our customers. Our team built PossibleAI to use real-time cash flow data, turning everyday bank transactions into an accurate representation of how people actually manage their money and make ends meet.”
Brandon, Data Science
More Than Cash Flow: Enhanced Security and Speed
Building Possible AI is about much more than training a model. It also means solving tough engineering and security problems so that decisions stay fast and reliable as we serve millions of customers.
Proactive Fraud Prevention
A responsible lending platform needs strong security. PossibleAI uses machine learning checks to help stop fraud before it happens. The system analyzes cash flow and other signals to confirm that we’re seeing financial activity from a real account. That includes matching names to ensure the linked bank account belongs to the person applying.
PossibleAI also keeps an eye out for unusual activity across the platform and can flag and respond to potential fraud in real time. This helps us keep the experience safer for our customers.
Just as important as catching fraud is protecting the personal information customers share with us. We use safeguards to protect your data and limit access to the people and systems that need to provide the service. PossibleAI itself is a proprietary system we only use inside Possible. For more detail on how we collect, use and protect information, you can check out our Privacy Policy.
“We challenged ourselves to build a secure system capable of processing millions of customer transactions instantly. Our mission is to make those underwriting decisions dependable and available the moment our customers need our assistance.”
Sanchit, Director of AI and Data
PossibleAI and the Human-Centered Experience
PossibleAI does more than power our lending decisions. It also supports our commitment to fast, human-centered customer support.
Introducing Our AI Support Assistant
Our AI assistant delivers fast support through email. It currently handles around 75% of incoming loan questions, providing answers to common issues about applications, payments and account status.
Customers can expect an answer in about 60 seconds, so they get help without waiting in a long queue. When a customer needs more detailed help, our AI assistant directs the conversation to the right human agent.
Helping Address Financial Exclusion
Working on the PossibleAI engine means helping tackle one of the biggest challenges in finance: exclusion. It's mission-driven engineering that has a direct impact on people’s lives.
Our team culture is focused on solving hard problems that matter. We bring together data scientists and engineers who care deeply about the mission. The chance to grow comes from the size of the challenge itself—finding new ways to improve how the financial system works for people who have been left out.
If you’re looking for a role where you can apply advanced machine learning to make the financial system more inclusive, the problems we work on can be deeply rewarding. All of this supports Possible’s mission to make financial stability possible for everyone.
What’s Next for PossibleAI
PossibleAI represents our commitment to moving beyond traditional financial measurement standards and leaning on real-time data instead. Next, we are expanding our AI support assistant into an in-app and web-based chat so we can support more people in the Possible community while still keeping the human connection at the center.
The story of more inclusive credit is still being written. We’re excited to keep building the technology that changes how creditworthiness is measured.
