Dive Brief:

• Digital payments company Block is working to expand the reach of its internal Cash App credit scores, betting that lenders will pay for more data about non-traditional payments and installment loans.
• The Oakland, California-based firm is in discussions with several parties, and will start officially working with them sometime this year, Block said Thursday in a news release. A company spokesperson said Block will charge for the scores, but declined to reveal pricing.
• “Block is inviting potential lending and distribution partners to join a waitlist for consideration to access Cash App Score,” the release said. Block declined to offer any details on potential customers for its score.

Dive Insight:

Those partners include “lenders offering the types of credit access our customers need and are asking for, as well as established industry partners who can help get the score to a wider audience and help our customers get access quickly,” a Block spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The spokesperson also declined to reveal which third parties Block is working with except to say that it was already in discussions with some potential lending customers. “Third party lending partners should be able to incorporate it into underwriting flows that consider a variety of other data points and scores,” the spokesperson said.

The score incorporates information from products like Cash App Borrow and Block’s buy now, pay later service Afterpay to determine a borrower’s creditworthiness. Block developed the internal scoring system in 2025.

Block’s stated goal with its Cash App score is to improve access to the financial system, but the company has leaned heavily into consumer lending in the past few months by, among other things, expanding the number of states where it offers short term loans.

Including non-traditional payments and transactions like buy now, pay later purchases into credit scores is a work in progress, but credit bureaus have moved in that direction over the past year. 

The BNPL player Affirm Holdings, for example, began reporting its customers’ transactions to the credit bureau Experian in April. Data analytics company FICO announced in June that it would start tracking BNPL transactions and share that information with credit bureaus.

Any third party that wants access to Cash App scores must meet certain requirements, Block’s Thursday press release said. A company spokesperson declined to provide more details on those requirements.

Cash App users tend to skew young and male, putting them in a demographic less likely to use traditional banking services, Bank of America analyst Mihir Bhatia said in a December interview.

Block has loaned consumers more $100 billion since 2022, Block said in the release. Cash App has 58 million monthly active users.