SentiLink Announces Plans to Launch Repute, a Consumer Reporting Agency Built to Help Alternative Finance Lenders Make Better Decisions Earlier

The FCRA-actionable Repute Score enables lenders to make decisions on nonprime leads before a specialty bureau is called.

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SentiLink, the leading provider of innovative identity, fraud, and risk solutions, today announced plans to launch Repute, a consumer reporting agency offering a new suite of credit products. Its first offering, the Repute Score for Alternative Finance, will be an FCRA-actionable credit score that enables alternative finance lenders to approve or decline leads before paying for a specialty bureau pull. The Repute Score for Alternative Finance will be generally available on March 1, 2027.

Lenders that buy leads at volume pay for a specialty bureau report on most of them, resulting in significant expense that could be avoided if better intelligence was available sooner in the funnel. The Repute Score sits in front of that call. Lenders can approve the lowest-risk leads and decline the highest-risk leads on the Repute Score alone, then send only the uncertain middle to the bureau. Because the score is FCRA-actionable, lenders can take adverse action on it directly.

In a retrospective study using one design partner's historical lead funnel, the Repute Score would have enabled the partner to:

• Materially reduce specialty bureau calls by decisioning on ~60% of leads at the Repute step.
• Better isolate nonpayment risk: bureau-approved leads scored as highest-risk by Repute were nearly 2x as likely to early default than the portfolio baseline.
• Fund more good leads: bureau-rejected leads scored as lowest-risk by Repute charged off nearly 20% less often than the portfolio baseline when funded by other lenders.

"All of us at SentiLink are proud to introduce Repute," said Naftali Harris, CEO and co-founder, SentiLink. "We are grateful to our early design partners for their trust in us and excited to help them and the rest of the industry better assess risk and improve their application funnels. It's time for new credit signals and more predictive data in the alternative finance market and beyond."

The Repute Score will be built only on inquiry and tradeline data furnished by participating lenders, including how loans perform after funding. It does not use data from SentiLink's fraud products, and lenders do not need any other SentiLink product to use it.

General availability to alternative finance lenders begins on March 1, 2027. Lenders can join as data furnishers now and evaluate the score on their own lead funnels ahead of launch. Learn more at https://resources.sentilink.com/repute or meet the SentiLink team at LEND360 in Austin, Oct. 12-14.

About SentiLink

SentiLink, the leading provider of innovative identity verification and fraud prevention solutions, empowers organizations to accurately identify customers and detect synthetic fraud, identity theft, and other hard-to-detect forms of first-party fraud. Its best-in-class solutions leverage a deep understanding of identity and risk informed by machine learning models and insights from a team of the industry's best risk analysts.

SentiLink serves:

• 13 of the 15 largest U.S. banks;
• 8 of the 10 largest U.S. credit unions;
• 3 of the 5 largest U.S. telecoms; and
• 500+ other companies and government organizations.

Headquartered in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2017 by Naftali Harris and Max Blumenfeld and has raised $85M to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Craft Ventures, and NYCA Partners, among others. Every day, SentiLink verifies 3M+ identities and flags over 150,000 high-risk applications to help its partners reduce fraud losses and verify more legitimate customers.

About Repute

Repute is SentiLink's suite of credit products that will be offered through a consumer reporting agency operated separately from SentiLink's other businesses. The first product, the Repute Score for Alternative Finance, will be generally available March 1, 2027.

SOURCE SentiLink