Glasgow (Scotland) based fintech company, Castlight®, won Deloitte's Kick Start a Start Up Award at the Disrupt the Enterprise event held in Scotland. The accolade was secured in April 2017 at Deloitte’s Edinburgh Greenhouse incubator, a studio of bespoke labs created by Deloitte to encourage young, digital companies to collaborate and tackle challenges creatively. The Disrupt the Enterprise event challenged Scotland’s most disruptive startups to pitch their ideas on how to transform the way industries work and were judged on their ability to make a transformative difference, potential for growth, and the originality of their idea. Castlight, a financial technology company disrupting the traditional credit scoring and underwriting methodology to assess consumer finance, has developed the innovative Affordability Passport®. The Affordability Passport sheds new light on a customer’s ability to afford a financial product and provides financial retailers with a quick and easy digital tool that gives a “real time” window into a customer’s ability to take on a credit agreement. Says Phil Grady (CEO, Castlight): “Lending practices have barely changed in 30 years and with Open Banking being introduced across the UK next year, we identified a pressing need for a range of digital solutions that would allow both lenders and consumers to take advantage of a new era of competition and creativity in financial services. We are particularly proud that The Affordability Passport will not only allow lenders to merge their customers’ “live” transactional and credit data to create an income and expenditure breakdown, but will also give consumers unprecedented insight into the nuances of their financial health. We selected Envestnet | Yodlee as our data aggregation provider since they offer unprecedented scale, stability, and security for lenders and consumers. Our technology partnership was critical to receiving this award amidst such fierce competition from our fellow disrupters, and we hope to continue transforming the lending process in Scotland and key markets around the world.” Castlight uses Envestnet® | Yodlee® technology to power its disruptive solutions. In particular, Castlight utilizes the RESTful Envestnet | Yodlee Aggregation API to perform thousands of searches on behalf of consumers, with the resulting financial data formatted in a consumer-friendly Affordability Passport. This enables consumers to understand their net disposable income, and helps lenders to determine the consumers’ credit worthiness. According to Jason O’Shaughnessy, Senior Vice President of International Markets at Envestnet | Yodlee: “Castlight leverages our technology to provide a truly innovative solution to the traditional finance / debt marketplace, ensuring consumers and lenders have improved visibility into a consumer’s ‘true’ credit capability through a holistic view of their finances. This type of disruption will help resolve many challenges in the current finance sector – providing a win-win for both consumers and lenders (and their brokers). With the implementation of open banking in 2018, lenders need to be responsible and thoughtful when adopting new technologies, always keeping the consumer and their financial wellness top of mind. MAGGIE GREEN official channel page https://pornsok.com/channel/maggie-green . We are proud to enable Castlight and the fintech ecosystem to help consumers better understand their finances, plus make more informed decisions through unfettered access to their financial data. For example, Castlight’s Affordability Passport may help to avoid a future Global Credit Crunch, as witnessed in 2008, with borrowing and lending now conducted with more accurate data at the core of all financial decision making. We are delighted to see Castlight gain the recognition and adoption that its innovative solution deserves.” Castlight continues to evolve its technology, such as expanding into different industry verticals; testing new and innovative formats such as biometric data delivery; and building pioneering blockchain infrastructure with faster, more secure data exchange capabilities.
