UK’s first credit builder debit card wins Innovate UK grant to enhance financial inclusion

Open banking-powered tool BuildMyCreditScore has secured a £200,000 grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to accelerate its offering to enhance financial inclusion and boost access to credit products.

BuildMyCreditScore is a Mastercard debit card that allows people to build their credit score without changing their spending habits, taking out additional lines of credit or risk building debt.

The Innovation in Professional & Financial Services grant from Innovate UK has an 8% acceptance rate with only 18 successful applicants out of 224 submissions – with £200,000 the maximum award from a total prize pot of £5m.

Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas.

This funding will enable BuildMyCreditScore to more accurately measure affordability and significantly increase applicant acceptance levels – particularly amongst those who may typically be denied access to credit products or incumbent credit building cards. This will be achieved through the application of advanced machine learning and open banking.

Currently, according to PwC, there are 20m financially underserved people across the UK with fair or poor credit scores. With this grant, BuildMyCreditScore will be able to support even more of these people looking to build their credit scores, significantly increasing the company’s market share.

With a quarter (23%) of Brits denied credit due to their poor credit score and over four in ten (43%) wanting an easier way to build their score that doesn’t involve taking out new lines of credit, there is demand for alternative solutions that do not risk building long-term debt.

According to UK Finance over 85% of UK card transactions are on debit card** – the BuildMyCreditScore card allows users to spend directly from a debit card ensuring users do not have to change their spending behaviour.

While the debit card works instantly like a regular bank card, the money is collected via Direct Debit by BuildMyCreditScore a number of days later. People are therefore able to build their credit score by demonstrating their ability to manage rolling outgoings and repay credit promptly.

In the pilot phase, BuildMyCreditScore helped hundreds of people improve their credit score. The app was tested by a pilot of 632 customers between December 2022 and June 2023. Of that number, the majority saw an increase in their credit score of between 11 and 55 points within the first three months of trialling the product.

James Lynn, CEO and Co-Founder of BuildMyCreditScore, comments: “This funding is a significant milestone in our mission to boost social inclusion across the UK and offer an innovative yet simple solution to build credit scores for millions more people.

“Traditionally, people need a strong credit score to access affordable credit in the first place, with those with lower scores forced to turn to more expensive credit options – this model is in desperate need of an overhaul. Innovate UK’s support will enable us to accelerate our growth and broaden our proposition to a much wider group of financially excluded people needing improved access to credit.

“BuildMyCreditScore leverages open banking to allow users to improve their scores without changing spending behaviour, having to take out new lines of credit or risk building long-term debt which carries the risk of actually harming their scores down the line.”

BuildMyCreditScore is compatible with all major high street bank accounts and works with Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax to report key credit data.