Bread Financial 2021 ESG Report: Fair & Responsible Banking
Originally published in Bread Financial's 2021 ESG Report
As a leading provider of branded credit programs, fair and responsible lending is core to our cardmembers’ journey. We take great care and consideration to ensure our consumer credit application and underwriting processes are administered equitably. We are transparent and impartial in our lending practices and rely on our fully automated proprietary process to accurately analyze and issue credit based on unbiased statistical modeling criteria.
Our automated lending process undergoes routine scrutiny both internally and externally to verify its decision-making criteria. As part of this assessment, we employ a third-party firm to conduct an extensive annual review of our credit portfolio and evaluation metrics, screening for any evidence of unintentional bias or discrimination to further ensure fair and responsible lending protocols.
During the underwriting process, issuing credit responsibly also means taking care not to overburden cardmembers with credit limits that surpass their ability to repay. We apply advanced analytics and best-practice industry strategies to establish limits that provide the appropriate level of credit access and spending power while responsibly protecting the interests and needs of both cardmembers and our partners.
We have resources dedicated to continually examine and evaluate our models to ensure we maintain accurate and consistent credit thresholds.
