A founder’s guide to the paths, tradeoffs, and decision points that matter There’s more than one way to launch a credit card. If you’re a fintech founder or early product lead exploring how to offer a credit product, you’ve likely discovered this already: there’s no single blueprint. Just a handful of viable paths each with their own infrastructure choices, regulatory implications, cost profiles, and long-term consequences. This post breaks down the core approaches, the real-

Gradient Boost Models (GBMs) have become the go-to tool for many credit modelers for good reason. GBMs can unlock meaningful lift in predictive accuracy, helping lenders better distinguish between high- and low-risk applicants, expand safe approvals, and reduce losses. But with great power comes great risk. At Ensemblex, we’ve spent years developing, testing, and monitoring GBM credit models. And while we remain strong advocates for their use in the right context, we also kno