An estimated 45 million Americans are either credit invisible or lack sufficient credit history to generate a score — leaving them effectively locked out of mainstream lending. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched a public inquiry to examine whether alternative data sources could help bridge this gap and expand access to affordable credit.
Traditional credit scoring relies on payment histories for mortgages, credit cards, and installment loans. This model works well for consumers with established credit records, but it systematically excludes millions who simply haven't had the opportunity to build one. Recent shifts in the scoring landscape — including FICO's move toward direct score licensing — signal that the industry is already rethinking how creditworthiness is measured. The CFPB is now exploring whether alternative credit data such as rent payments, utility bills, and mobile phone payments could provide lenders with a more complete and accurate picture of a borrower's reliability — data points that reflect real financial behavior but currently go unrecognized by conventional scoring models.
The opportunity is significant. For lenders, access to alternative credit data could meaningfully expand their addressable market while enabling more accurate risk assessments for previously unscorable applicants. The TransUnion 2026 consumer credit forecast reinforces this outlook — as delinquencies stabilize across lending categories, institutions that broaden their credit evaluation criteria now will be better positioned to grow their portfolios responsibly. For consumers, alternative data represents a potential pathway into the credit system and toward long-term financial stability. Lenders who build the infrastructure to ingest and act on these non-traditional inputs today will be better positioned as the regulatory and competitive landscape shifts.
The CFPB is also carefully weighing the risks. Alternative data could introduce new privacy concerns, add operational complexity, and — if poorly managed — introduce bias correlated to race, ethnicity, or other protected characteristics. FCRA compliance obligations around permissible purpose, data accuracy, and adverse action will apply to alternative data just as they do to traditional credit reports. Lenders must be prepared to demonstrate that their use of such data is both lawful and equitable — and that their data governance practices meet the standards outlined in frameworks like the FTC Safeguards Rule.
For lenders operating within Salesforce, the practical question becomes infrastructure: how do you reliably pull credit report data in Salesforce and incorporate Experian Salesforce integrations alongside emerging alternative data sources — all within a single, auditable workflow? That's precisely where purpose-built tooling makes the difference. LASER's ACCESS pillar is designed to help lenders navigate exactly this kind of evolving data landscape — aggregating both traditional bureau data and alternative credit inputs within a seamless Salesforce-native environment so institutions can evaluate more borrowers with confidence, consistency, and full regulatory transparency.