What Money20/20 told me about the future of lending

There’s busy and there’s Money20/20 busy. Back-to-back meetings, people to catch up with, fresh ideas to discuss. I look forward to it every year. 

And somewhere between the panels, lunches, and hallway conversations, I realized the same themes kept emerging.

It started on our own stage. Our CEO Jose moderated a lending panel with Karen Ellenberger, Senior Director of Product at Best Egg, and Akram Belghith, VP of Data at Kiavi, centered around a simple question: What does a lender actually need to know about a borrower and when?

I knew it would be a great conversation. I didn’t realize it would become a preview of the whole week.

A decade-long wait

Karen put it well on stage: “You can only move as fast as the slowest part of the system.” 

Knowing more about a borrower only helps if the rest of the process can act on it. A few days later, a product leader told me his team had wanted to pay off debt directly, rather than mail checks, for almost a decade. They spent most of that time waiting for the systems to catch up.

Lenders often couldn’t see what a borrower actually owed, and had no easy way to pay creditors directly. Several of the teams I met now have both on their roadmap for the coming months.

Payoff is moving into the offer

That ability to act on the data changes the underwriting decision too.

Debt consolidation is the clearest example. On paper, a borrower taking out a new loan is adding debt. But if that loan pays off several existing debts at once, they can come out of the transaction with less debt, a lower DTI, or a healthier mix of it.

The lenders I met are increasingly asking what that verified payoff is worth. For some, it shows up in the rate or approval amount. Others plan to recalculate debt-to-income after payoff, so the offer reflects where the borrower will stand once their old debts are cleared.

What happens between bureau reports

And the borrower doesn’t stop changing once the loan funds.

Bureau data remains the foundation of lending, and nobody I met wants to replace it. But a lot can shift between application and funding, and plenty more after that.

Card and servicing teams raised this again and again in my meetings. They want to understand what happens between those snapshots: whether a borrower has started paying in full, or whether early signs of stress are showing up weeks before they otherwise would.

Work on your data

All of this becomes more important as lenders put AI to work.

When Jose asked the panel what lenders should do in the next twelve months, Karen and Akram landed in the same place: work on your data. A model trained on inconsistent decisions learns the inconsistency, and AI built on poorly curated data will give you the wrong answer with complete confidence.

Or as Akram put it: “Don’t try to automate yesterday’s process.”

Beyond Money20/20

Many of the lenders I met are in the middle of 2027 planning, and the question Jose put to the panel came up in almost every conversation: what do we need to know about this borrower and when can we act on it?

That’s the question Method is built around. A live view of what a borrower owes changes what a lender can do: prefill an application, price against the borrower’s current position, approve a consolidation loan based on where their DTI will be after payoff, or send proceeds directly to creditors at funding.

The common thread from the stage to almost every meeting I had was that better data matters most when it changes what you can do next.

Let’s keep the conversation going

Two events this week take the same question further.

The AI advantage in lending: An evening with Method & Valon
Tuesday, October 27, at 5:30 PM PT, Chotto Matte, San Francisco
An invite-only dinner with Kyle Grochmal of Valon, Stephen Schall of SoFi, and Jose on how lenders are putting AI to work, from underwriting and decisioning to the borrower experience. Request a seat

The missing links in digital lending, with American Banker
Wednesday, October 28, at 2 PM ET
Elana Golub and Priyanshi Churiwala on how leading lenders connect application, funding, and servicing to fund more loans. Register