For decades, credit bureaus have defined how lenders decide who deserves access to credit. But their lens has always been narrow — focused almost entirely on debt, delinquencies, and repayment history. As Nova Credit Co-founder and CEO Misha Esipov told me, that view leaves too many consumers invisible.
“There are still a hundred million Americans who struggle to get basic access to credit,” Esipov said. “The only way to fix that responsibly is with better data.”
The problem, he explained, isn’t just that legacy credit scoring is outdated — it’s that it’s static. Traditional bureaus report on liabilities and missed payments, but not on the actual financial lives people live day to day: income, spending, savings, and cash flow.
“Just looking at someone’s liabilities is a fraction of their financial health,” Esipov said. “You’re missing income, you’re missing expenses, you’re missing assets, you’re missing whether someone has overdrafted. That’s the missing half of the picture.”
Cash Flow as a Foundation
Cash flow underwriting has emerged as one of the most promising fixes for this problem, enabling lenders to assess “ability to pay” through bank transaction data rather than just credit files.
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Esipov sees this as more than a better model. It’s a step toward a new foundation for how creditworthiness is defined.
“Modeling income and understanding ability to pay is foundational,” he said. “The biggest gap in the U.S. credit bureau system is its inability to understand income. That’s what makes cash flow data so powerful — you can see it, verify it, and use it to make better decisions.”
Even when incomes fluctuate, visibility into deposits gives lenders confidence about stability and resilience. That makes this approach especially relevant in a gig economy where consumers piece together multiple income streams.
From Fragmentation to Standardization
The momentum behind cash flow underwriting is real. But Esipov is quick to point out that today’s activity still feels fragmented. Every bank and fintech has its own flavor, its own model, its own view of the data.
“What’s missing,” he said, “is a standard, a trusted, interoperable framework for using real-time data across the industry.”
That, he argues, is where Nova Credit and its partners are focusing their efforts. At the company’s Cash Flow Underwriting Summit, the shift from exploration to execution was unmistakable.
“We had 38 of the top 40 largest consumer lenders and banks in attendance,” Esipov said. “The big shift is seeing partners like Chase and PayPal investing in cash flow underwriting as a core capability.”
He believes that what began as experimentation is quickly becoming infrastructure.
Toward a Real-Time Credit Bureau
Esipov doesn’t predict that cash flow underwriting will immediately replace credit bureaus. Not yet anyway. But the direction of travel is clear.
“The end state is one where risk officers will have a choice,” he said. “Do you use only bureau data, or do you use bureau and bank data? And when given that choice, any risk officer would choose more data.”
That future will require something that doesn’t exist today. A real-time credit bureau, one that defines the standards, compliance, and analytics for bank data in the same way the legacy bureaus did for debt.
“We’re working with industry leaders to set the standard for how to take this very messy data and put it into a format that the industry knows and trusts,” Esipov said.
New Standard for an Evolving Economy
The credit industry has reached an inflection point. Everyone agrees that the old system is flawed. But what comes next isn’t just better models, Esipov believe that it’s a new kind of bureau, one built on real-time, consumer-permissioned data that reflects the true ability to pay.
“This is not a game of basis points of improvement,” Esipov said. “This is a step change — hundreds of basis points in approval rates. It gets more people approved for the products and services they deserve, and it helps businesses grow responsibly.”
He seems the path forward as clear: better data, common standards, and an infrastructure that turns fragmented innovation into a shared system of trust.
In other words, the blueprint for a real-time credit bureau fit for a real-time economy.
