TSB deployed Credit Canary's income identification and affordability analysis tooling to transform how their unsecured lending team handles declined applications — turning rejections into responsible approvals.
TSB is one of the UK's leading retail banks, serving millions of customers across the country. Within their unsecured lending division, a team of 8 people was responsible for handling declined loan applications — applications that represented both lost revenue and disappointed customers.
The existing process was manual and cumbersome. When a customer was declined, the team would send out DocuSign requests asking for additional income documentation. Tracking was limited, response rates were low, and the manual nature of the outreach meant many potentially viable borrowers simply fell through the cracks. Officers had to wait for documents to arrive, manually review them, and re-assess — a process that could take weeks.
The team knew that a significant portion of declines were borderline cases where better income verification could change the outcome. A customer might have been rejected because the underwriting system lacked visibility into all their income sources, or because the affordability assessment was based on incomplete information. They had strong intuition that with better data, they could responsibly approve loans that were currently being turned down. But they lacked the tooling to prove it efficiently, to scale the process, or to do it without adding overhead to the team.
"The old process involved sending DocuSign requests and hoping customers would respond. Now we can verify income through Open Banking in seconds — and we're converting 40% of declines into responsible approvals."— TSB Unsecured Lending Team
Credit Canary was deployed as a comprehensive platform to overhaul the declined-application workflow. Rather than relying on manual document collection and guesswork, the team now had access to real, verified financial data.
Credit Canary's income identification tooling gave the team a far more accurate picture of applicant income. Instead of relying on what customers self-reported or on manual document review, the platform used Open Banking data to automatically identify and verify income streams. This meant the team could see the full picture: salary, bonuses, side income, dividends, rental income — everything that mattered for affordability. The income was verified in real-time, directly from the customer's bank account.
One of the key innovations was a new end-of-day balances model that opened up entirely new types of affordability checks. This model has been validated across 20+ banks, providing reliable balance data that traditional approaches couldn't match. Where previous underwriting relied on snapshots or estimates, the team now had access to true end-of-day figures — eliminating a major source of error and enabling more sophisticated affordability analysis.
Credit Canary's statement view made Open Banking data appear like physical bank statements — familiar and intuitive for the lending team. This dramatically reduced the learning curve. Officers who had spent years reading paper statements could now apply that same expertise to the digital interface. The data was presented in a way they understood, which meant faster assessments and fewer errors.
The platform's affordability tooling replaced the clunky DocuSign-based process. Instead of sending requests and waiting for customers to respond — a process that could take weeks and had poor conversion rates — the team could pull verified income and expenditure data directly through Open Banking. The customer's consent was obtained digitally in seconds, not days. The data was live, accurate, and actionable.
The result was a complete overhaul of the declined-application workflow: faster, more accurate, and far less friction for both the team and the customer. What once took weeks and required multiple touchpoints could now happen in minutes. And because the data was verified, the team could approve loans with confidence.
The impact was immediate and measurable:
TSB is now expanding Credit Canary's tooling beyond the initial unsecured lending team. The rollout is moving across all decline codes and into the branch network, with the goal of ensuring every borderline decline gets a fair, data-driven second look. The success of the income identification and affordability tooling has opened conversations about broader deployment across TSB's lending operations.
For a bank serving millions of customers, the ability to responsibly approve more loans — while maintaining strict risk controls — is a competitive advantage. Credit Canary made that possible.
See how Credit Canary's income identification and affordability tooling can transform your decline recovery.