NEW YORK— Propel Holdings CEO Clive Kinross is making a blunt case that the traditional FICO score is losing relevance for a growing share of U.S. borrowers, arguing that AI-driven underwriting built around real-time cash flow and income timing may better define the future of consumer credit, according to an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
Speaking during a PYMNTS “Monday Conversation,” Kinross said many of the near-prime consumers Propel is targeting with its newly launched unsecured credit product, FreshLine, “can’t score on a FICO basis,” adding that legacy credit models often fail to capture a borrower’s current financial reality. Instead of focusing on what happened “two, three, four or five years ago,” Kinross said Propel’s models emphasize recent cash flow, employment and earnings stability over the last three to nine months—an approach he suggested is better suited to a credit market where banks have tightened underwriting and many working consumers are increasingly being shut out.
FreshLine is aimed at borrowers in roughly the 650-to-700 FICO range, a segment Kinross described as caught in a “K-shaped” credit economy in which super-prime borrowers continue to move higher while prime and near-prime consumers slip backward. In the PYTMNTS interview, he argued those borrowers are often not reckless spenders but households facing timing and liquidity challenges, making traditional score-based underwriting an increasingly blunt instrument at a moment when many consumers struggle to absorb even modest emergency expenses.
Kinross said Propel’s platform uses machine learning to analyze thousands of variables in real time, including income timing, expense distribution and cash-flow patterns, allowing repayment schedules to be aligned more precisely with when money actually hits a borrower’s account. That, he argued, is more than risk management—it is a form of consumer protection that can reduce avoidable delinquencies while also increasing the speed and accuracy of credit decisioning and repayment execution, a model that points to a future where underwriting and payment throughput are driven less by static scores and more by dynamic, AI-based cash-flow intelligence.
To support growth without overloading its own balance sheet, Propel launched FreshLine with $210 million in forward-flow commitments from third-party investors, with Kinross telling PYMNTS the lending-as-a-service structure should approach 10% of company revenue by year-end. The broader implication: as lenders search for ways to serve borrowers who fall between prime and subprime, the debate may shift from whether FICO still matters to whether AI can more responsibly—and more efficiently—replace it as the core engine of credit access.