In many lending businesses, underwriting is seen as the engine of profitability — the place where decisions get made, risk gets priced, and growth is controlled. But as portfolios mature, something interesting happens: underwriting’s impact on long-term value starts to plateau. The real leverage shifts to how you manage the customers you already have. At Ensemblex, we’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly across fintechs and neobanks. The fastest-growing firms learn to tr

Off-us data has transformed how lenders think about risk, growth, and competition. But like any powerful tool, it’s easy to misuse. In our work with clients, we’ve seen three common pitfalls — and the practices that can help avoid them. Pitfall 1: Misinterpreting Benchmarks Looking at competitor performance is incredibly valuable — but dangerous if not translated correctly. One lender assumed higher rates would automatically mean worse performance. Instead, benchmarking revea

For many financial services companies, lending is the next big step. Payments, deposits, and other services create a strong base, but credit creates a large, profitable business. The challenge? Well, it’s credit. Not just another product feature, a mismanaged credit product can sink a business. One solution is to move very slowly, but that has its own costs: wasted runway, time, and opportunity. At Ensemblex, we know that credit and fast growth are compatible under discipline

Do you want to accurately and consistently segment risk, therefore enabling your entire credit strategy? Then yes, you need to monitor your model! We see robust monitoring save our clients real money all the time: A shadow scoring test flagged PSI anomalies arising from a difference in a vendor's data at month-end (a quirk that wasn't visible in the development data set). We were able to make adjustments to the model in production. A live model suddenly received drastically d

We see so many lenders get stuck in the same paradoxical situation: they're trying to expand their reach to the millions of underbanked or thin-file customers, but their own policies stand in the way. For good reason. Governance structures designed for lending to prime, salaried borrowers shouldn't be recklessly expanded to serve borrowers with no credit history. That would be trying to serve a  motorbike mechanic using the same credit policies built for a  mid-career engine

At Ensemblex, we work with lenders across the fintech ecosystem — from startups to scaled portfolios — and we see many people making the same mistakes when measuring risk on revolving credit products. These mistakes lead to bad decisions, mispriced risk, and inaccurate expectations for portfolio performance. Here are some of the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them. 1. Measuring Risk “Vertically” Instead of Horizontally Many lenders look at risk in time slices — delinqu

Choosing the right underwriting model is one of the most strategic decisions a lender makes. The right approach depends on many factors:...

“We raised too much money,” he said. “I thought we could figure out the economics later.”