The 2022 DataDay Awards winners

As apps and institutions further integrate, data and data sharing have become the building blocks of modern finance. Entire ecosystems are being built around financial institutions and fintechs that incorporate rich and impactful information about their customers.

Tearsheet’s DataDay Awards are the industry’s top awards program, recognizing and celebrating the best data products, services, and brands powering the modern financial system.

Our 2022 winners include:

Best Alternative Data Product: Argyle

Argyle supplements credit scores via income verification and employment data, paving the way for more equitable financial access, including for the growing population in the contract, gig and creator economies. Argyle’s SaaS technology enables its business customers to make decisions based on income verification and employment data that is real-time, user-permissioned, and equitable for all working individuals, not just full-time employees. Whether workers are employed by Uber or Walmart or any employer under the umbrella of WorkforceNow by ADP, Argyle has developed a single method to organize the information wrapped up in employment records, making it usable and useful to businesses in verticals like lending, mortgage underwriting, banking insurance, auto sales and leasing.

Data Company of the Year: Mastercard

Mastercard believes that consumers should have control over who has access to their financial data, what aspects of it are shared, what it’s being shared for and the power to revoke sharing permissions. This past year, Mastercard launched new products and direct access agreements. All of these activities strengthen Mastercard’s position in open banking and a trusted provider of data and insights. Mastercard’s open banking platform provides secure connections to consumer-permissioned financial data. This data can power use cases like credit decisioning, account opening and linking. It creates more choice in payments and transaction data for better financial insights.

Best Data Aggregator/Bank Partnership: Plaid and Green Dot

Through open finance API solution, Plaid Exchange, Green Dot’s GO2Bank customers – which serves lower income populations and people living paycheck to paycheck – will now have access to modern digital financial services to help them lead healthier financial lives. Green Dot and Plaid began working together in 2018 to streamline Green Dot’s onboarding flow and give further access to the financial ecosystem for users. Since then, Green Dot has been an important partner providing feedback on new products, grown across card lines and programs, and has grown from there to include being a strategic Data Access Partner. Looking ahead, the companies plan to work together to bring open finance services to Green Dot’s broader customer base, including its banking-as-a-service partners who reach millions of customers, including small business owners and gig workers.

Best Customer Data Implementation: Kabbage from American Express

A small business can connect its real-time financial data to Kabbage Insights and access an analysis of the company’s historical, current, and future cash-flow 24/7. The product continually evaluates the transaction activity of a customer over a 90-day period and organizes it in a dashboard, allowing customers to visualize their net growth without having to calculate it themselves. Customers can then set a desired low-balance threshold and receive automated alerts if accounts are predicted to dip below it, allowing small businesses to identify and prevent cash deficits before they occur.

Data Innovation Award: Fiserv and MX

People expect to access information from their primary banking accounts through fintech apps, payment services, and other third parties. Authenticating their financial institution accounts with a trusted third-party provider shouldn't require consumers to share their private username and password. Fiserv and MX have partnered to accelerate the future of open finance through secure, reliable consumer financial data sharing. MX is the first company to access tokenized consumer data via AllData Connect from Fiserv, to better enable a more secure way for consumers to share their financial data with their favorite apps or services.

Best New Alternative Data Product: Nova Credit

Approximately two million newcomers arrive in the United States every year unable to access credit upon arrival as they lack U.S. credit history. Nova Credit’s core innovation, Credit Passport, addresses this problem by partnering with credit bureaus around the world to deliver real-time international credit data to banks and lenders in the United States. Nova Credit makes it possible for newcomers to transport their financial identity across borders which helps them integrate faster and achieve economic security. Similar to a U.S. credit report, Nova Credit provides a FICO-equivalent score, tradelines, and inquiry history. Nova Credit has helped unlock consumer-permissioned access to over 1.1 billion credit profiles in over 20 countries.