SentiLink, a provider of identity, fraud, and risk solutions, has announced plans to launch Repute, a consumer reporting agency that will offer a new suite of credit products. The company's first offering, the Repute Score for Alternative Finance, is an FCRA-actionable credit score designed to enable alternative finance lenders to approve or decline leads before paying for a specialty bureau pull. The Repute Score for Alternative Finance is scheduled to become generally available on March 1, 2027.

Lenders that purchase leads at high volume currently pay for a specialty bureau report on most of them, generating significant expense that could be avoided if better intelligence were available earlier in the funnel. The Repute Score sits in front of that call. Using the score alone, lenders can approve the lowest-risk leads and decline the highest-risk leads, sending only the uncertain middle to the bureau. Because the score is FCRA-actionable, lenders can take adverse action on it directly. The FCRA, or Fair Credit Reporting Act, is the federal law that governs consumer reporting agencies and the use of their data in credit decisions, including the adverse action notices required when a lender denies credit based on information in a consumer report.

In a retrospective study based on one design partner's historical lead funnel, SentiLink said the Repute Score would have enabled the partner to:

• Materially reduce specialty bureau calls by decisioning on approximately 60% of leads at the Repute step.
• Better isolate nonpayment risk: bureau-approved leads scored as highest-risk by Repute were nearly twice as likely to early default as the portfolio baseline.
• Fund more good leads: bureau-rejected leads scored as lowest-risk by Repute charged off nearly 20% less often than the portfolio baseline when funded by other lenders.

"All of us at SentiLink are proud to introduce Repute," said Naftali Harris, CEO and co-founder of SentiLink. "We are grateful to our early design partners for their trust in us and excited to help them and the rest of the industry better assess risk and improve their application funnels. It's time for new credit signals and more predictive data in the alternative finance market and beyond."

According to SentiLink, the Repute Score will be built only on inquiry and tradeline data — records of credit applications and credit accounts — furnished by participating lenders, including how loans perform after funding. That structure means the dataset behind the score reflects the activity participating lenders contribute. It does not use data from SentiLink's fraud products, and lenders do not need any other SentiLink product to use it.