Block opens Cash App Score to outside lenders through Nova Credit partnership
The proprietary score, built from Cash App transaction data, becomes available to auto, credit card and personal lenders through Nova Credit’s Cash Flow Intelligence Platform — with users controlling whether their data is shared.
Block is making its proprietary Cash App Score available to external lenders for the first time, through a new partnership with credit-data company Nova Credit, the companies announced Tuesday.
Cash App Score is Block's own risk score, built from the transaction history of Cash App's user base — money moving in and out of the app, spending patterns and account behavior that a traditional credit file does not capture. Until now, Block has used the score internally, largely to underwrite its own lending products inside Cash App. The Nova Credit deal is the first time it will be distributed to lenders outside Block.
Access runs through Nova Credit's Cash Flow Intelligence Platform, which lenders already use to pull cash-flow-based underwriting signals from bank and other financial accounts. Nova Credit said lenders will be able to use the Cash App Score alongside their existing data to evaluate applicants for auto loans, credit cards and personal loans.
Both companies emphasized that sharing is opt-in: Cash App users control, through preference settings inside the app, whether their score is made available to a requesting lender, and the companies said no additional login or credential-sharing is required when a user consents.
The move extends a trend already visible elsewhere in consumer fintech — alternative, transaction-based scoring data moving out of a single app's walled garden and into the broader lending market, on the theory that cash-flow history can extend credit access to applicants a bureau-only score would treat as too thin a file to underwrite confidently. How much lenders actually rely on the score in practice, versus treating it as a supplementary signal alongside conventional bureau data, will likely take longer than a launch announcement to determine.
The partnership sits inside a broader environment of regulatory debate over consumer financial data-sharing, including ongoing rulemaking about the open-banking data-access rules that govern how much control a consumer has over data like this once a third party requests it.