Not upheld: irresponsible lending complaint against Fairscore Ltd trading as Updraft

Decision detail

Summary

Mr T complained that Updraft irresponsibly lent him £4,000 in October 2024, arguing that the lender should have questioned his high transaction volumes (56 outgoing transactions totalling £7,719 in the three months prior to approval). Updraft verified Mr T's income at approximately £1,929 net monthly through open banking and used a combination of Mr T's declarations, CRA credit commitment data, and industry-standard modelling for expenditure assessment, applying higher figures where modelling suggested greater costs. The ombudsman found that Updraft's checks were proportionate and that it would not have been reasonable to expect the lender to manually aggregate all transactions from a single account when they lacked visibility of outgoings across all of Mr T's accounts. The complaint was not upheld.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

The ombudsman found that Updraft's checks were proportionate given the type and amount of credit involved. While Mr T highlighted high transaction volumes in the three months prior, the ombudsman reasoned that it would not have been proportionate for Updraft to manually aggregate all transactions from a single open banking account, especially when they did not have visibility of outgoings across all of Mr T's accounts. Updraft appropriately used a combination of Mr T's declarations, CRA data on credit commitments, and industry-standard modelling, using the higher figures when modelling suggested expenditure was greater than declared. The affordability assessment showed repayments would be sustainable, and there was no recent adverse credit information to trigger further investigation.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website