Beforepay Group launches Carrington Labs to offer AI-led risk models and lending platform

By Gloria Mathias

Beforepay Group has announced the launch of its B2B offering, which will make the company’s technology available to enterprises. This offering commercialises the company’s risk-management solutions, proprietary models, and lending platform.

The new business will trade under the name “Carrington Labs” and will offer enterprise clients the same technology and artificial intelligence tools that power Beforepay’s ethical lending products and enable the company’s rapid growth, high levels of efficiency, and lending outcomes.

Carrington Labs will offer two products. The first is a decision engine that brings together the company’s AI-powered risk-management modules, using alternative data to make quick, accurate lending decisions in a fully automated, low-cost manner. This engine combines the following tools:

• AI-powered pay cycle detection and prediction: Algorithms that use natural-language processing (NLP) and machine learning are used to identify salary transactions.
• Data ingestion and pre-processing: A module to take in different types of alternative data, categorise transactions, and prepare the data for training and inference.
• Advanced risk assessment: The native AI risk-scoring model tests more than 50,000 individual variables to select the 400–500 most predictive variables that could impact a borrower’s financial stability and creditworthiness, including behavioural, financial, and other factors, using gradient-boosting algorithms.
• Personalised limit-setting: An engine that automatically conducts programmatic A/B testing, randomising users into different cohorts with different limit journeys, to create data points that can then allow estimation of default elasticity.
• Repayment scheduling and debiting: logic to combine the limit-setting outputs and the pay cycle forecasting to create an individual, optimised schedule for customer repayments.

The second product from Carrington Labs will be an end-to-end loan origination and servicing platform, the next iteration of the highly automated, highly efficient lending platform.

This solution will aim to support an entirely digital lending journey, expected to enable customers to go from account creation to funds received in as little as 5 minutes, done entirely through a smartphone app. It will seek to combine origination, loan management, and an optional front-end experience in an integrated and efficient way.