Block is making its proprietary Cash App Score available to external lenders for the first time, partnering with Nova Credit to give other financial institutions access to the alternative credit scoring tool it has used internally. Which leaves an obvious question: how much appetite is there, beyond Block itself, for credit decisions built on this kind of data?
What Cash App Score Actually Measures
Cash App Score was built to draw on real-time data from across the Cash App ecosystem: spending, saving, repayment behaviour, paycheck deposits, and peer-to-peer activity. The aim is a continuous, holistic picture of a user’s financial health rather than the periodic snapshot that a traditional credit file provides.
Block has been using the tool in its own lending product, Cash App Borrow, and says the results have been substantial. According to Block, Cash App Score allows it to approve roughly 38% more customers at the same loss rate as traditional credit scores would produce. That is not a marginal improvement in a sector where underwriting margins are tight.
The user base this touches is worth understanding. Block says that more than 50% of 18-to-25-year-olds in the United States use Cash App monthly. And within Cash App Borrow specifically, roughly 70% of customers have FICO scores below 580, placing them in the range that mainstream lenders typically decline or price at a premium. Those two figures together sketch the population this tool is designed to serve: younger, cash-economy users who have real financial activity but little traditional credit history to show for it.
Cash App Score Lenders: a Wider Conversation Starting in September
The commercial arrangement with Nova Credit means that third-party lenders will be able to incorporate Cash App Score data into their own underwriting processes, rather than being limited to whatever Block decides to do with it internally. The partnership is set to be discussed publicly at Nova Credit’s Cash Flow Intelligence Summit in New York City on 10 September 2026, according to Investing.com.
The broader context here matters. Consumers’ financial lives are increasingly spread across multiple banks, fintechs, and platforms. A traditional credit file may capture the mortgage and the credit card, but it is unlikely to reflect the BNPL instalments, the digital wallet activity, or the irregular income patterns that characterise a growing share of the population. That fragmentation is precisely what alternative credit scoring tools are trying to address.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is a useful illustration of the problem. Usage has risen sharply over recent years, and there is growing evidence that BNPL is not simply a tool for splitting large discretionary purchases. Consumers are using instalment products to cover everyday expenses, including groceries, utilities, and in some cases rent. Yet BNPL activity typically does not feed into traditional credit scores, leaving a blind spot for any lender relying on conventional data alone.
Macroeconomic pressure has sharpened all of this. Inflation and elevated interest rates pushed living costs higher and sent credit card debt to levels that have made both lenders and regulators uneasy. The environment creates incentives for lenders to find better ways of assessing risk, not just of expanding credit access.
That said, the caution embedded in traditional credit scoring is not without purpose. The conventional model was built to protect lenders as much as consumers, and it has largely done that job over many decades. Alternative scores introduce new data, but they also introduce new model risk. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both moved to incorporate alternative credit scoring and have lowered their minimum credit score thresholds to broaden access to homeownership, but that experiment is still relatively young.
For Block, opening Cash App Score to external lenders through Nova Credit is a way of monetising an internal capability and, perhaps, of establishing the tool as something closer to an industry standard. Whether other lenders find the 38% approval uplift replicable in their own books is the number that will determine how quickly this moves from partnership announcement to mainstream underwriting practice. The Cash Flow Intelligence Summit on 10 September should offer the first real read on how the market is responding.
