Karen Webster didn’t send Clive Kinross the questions ahead of time. So when she asked him, point-blank, whether the FICO score was dying, he hadn’t prepared an answer.
What came out was unscripted. And more revealing for it.
“Our consumers, you can’t score on a FICO basis,” the CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings said. “Which is why we need the machine learning and … AI.”
His answer is the intellectual engine behind FreshLine, Propel’s newly-launched unsecured credit product targeting near-prime borrowers who have been largely pushed out of the traditional banking system. Not subprime. Not prime. But stuck in the middle.
The Question He Didn’t See Coming
The FICO score has been the gatekeeper of American credit for decades. But Kinross made an unguarded case that it is structurally misaligned with the consumers who need credit most right now.
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“We’re way more interested in their recent cash flow, their recent employment, and earning stability over the last three, six, nine months than we are in what happened two, three, four or five years ago,” he said.
A backward-looking score, built to evaluate a borrower’s history, misses the story of who that person is today. FreshLine is built on the premise that the story of today is the only one that really matters.
The Borrower Nobody Is Serving Well
FreshLine targets consumers in the 650 to 700 FICO band. Those consumers who are employed, earning income, but increasingly frozen out by banks that have tightened underwriting standards in response to macro pressure. Kinross calls it a K-shaped credit economy. Super-prime borrowers moving up, Prime and near-Prime slipping down.
“Historically, these consumers were upwardly mobile and could think of a life where they move up to prime and ultimately super-prime,” Kinross said. “In today’s dynamic, we are seeing the opposite.”
The stakes are concrete.
About 40% of the U.S. population cannot cover a $400 emergency expense, even as PYMNTS Intelligence data finds that the typical expense is three to four times higher. These are not consumers living beyond their means. They are people managing a cash-flow problem with no good tools to do it. Kinross said that FreshLine is designed to be that tool, underwritten responsibly rather than punitively.
AI Underwriting as Responsible Lending
What Kinross says separates FreshLine from both traditional bank credit and more punitive short-term lending is the underwriting model.
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Propel’s platform analyzes thousands of variables in real time. Not just income level, but income timing, expense distribution and cash-flow patterns across the month.
For consumers with multiple income streams or irregular pay cycles, an increasingly common reality, that granularity is decisive.
“We have to look at all of their sources of income,” Kinross said, “and make sure that we’re matching their repayment dates with when the income is actually coming into their bank accounts.”
That matching isn’t just risk management, it’s a different form of consumer protection. A repayment date misaligned with a borrower’s pay cycle doesn’t just create a delinquency on a lender’s books; it pushes a working person into entirely avoidable distress. The AI does what a careful loan officer once did by hand, at scale, and at a cost that makes the economics work.
Built to Scale Without Breaking the Balance Sheet
FreshLine launched with $210 million in forward-flow commitments from third-party investors, meaning Propel generates fee revenue while risk sits largely off its own balance sheet. Kinross expects the lending-as-a-service model to approach 10% of revenue by year-end, a capital-efficient structure that lets the product scale as long as investor appetite holds.
Right now, that appetite appears strong.
The Bigger Bet
When Webster asked about FICO, she was really asking something larger: is the credit system, as currently built, capable of serving the people who need it most?
Kinross’s answer, delivered without forewarning, without preparation, was essentially: no.
And FreshLine is Propel’s attempt to build the replacement. Not a product priced on the past, but one underwritten in real time, for borrowers as they are today.
It’s a wager that the middle of the credit market is being permanently redrawn, and that the lenders who can price that shift responsibly will define what consumer credit looks like for the next decade.
“Our consumers need to think really, really hard about each dollar they spend. Each cup of coffee they buy, each pair of jeans — do they absolutely need it? Kinross said. “And that kind of discipline is what they live with every day. That makes them good money managers. They’re very aware of their financial situation. And I think that’s oftentimes lost or misunderstood.”
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