From credit scores to real-time insight: Emma Steeley on the next era of lending

In conversation with Credit Strategy, Steeley reflects on the lessons that shaped her career, the structural shifts underway in the credit ecosystem, and why eligibility, affordability and behavioural insight must evolve together if the industry is to deliver better outcomes for both lenders and consumers.

From an unexpected start to a data-led career

Like many now leading in financial services, Steeley did not set out with a master plan to build a career in credit. Her entry into the sector came almost by accident, head hunted out of a role in recruitment by a financial services CEO who saw potential.

From the outset, Steeley was taught that credibility in this industry comes not from title or presence, but from mastery of the numbers.

“I was told very early on that knowing the data and the metrics was everything,”  she recalls. “That’s what keeps you in the room.”

It’s a lesson Steeley still leans on today. Across every role, from lending to open banking and now leading Infinian, data has been an anchor. Not data for its own sake, but data that explains behaviour, risk and real-world financial pressure.

What continues to motivate Steeley, nearly twenty years in, is the industry’s capacity for reinvention. Few sectors combine regulation, innovation and societal impact in quite the same way.

“The UK is genuinely world-leading in financial services,” she says. “Operating under FCA regulation since 2014, while still innovating at pace.”

A credit industry that is learning to collaborate

For all its innovation, the credit industry has often been criticised for moving too slowly. Steeley doesn’t disagree but believes something fundamental has shifted over the past five years.

Large financial institutions are no longer instinctively defensive about fintech. Instead, partnership has become the default.

Consumer Duty has played a decisive role, pushing firms to look beyond compliance checklists and towards measurable customer outcomes. COVID, too, accelerated a change in mindset, forcing incumbents to move faster and lean on more agile technology partners.

“There’s now a genuine openness from large FIs to work with fintech’s in harmony,” Steeley explains. “That wasn’t always the case.”

For the first time, there is alignment between regulation, technology and commercial incentives, a rare but powerful combination.

Why Infinian, and why now?

When Steeley joined Infinian, it was the convergence of timing and purpose that drew her in.

Infinian offered the opportunity to have immediate, tangible impact at a moment when the industry is being forced to rethink its foundations. The finalisation of the CIMS review represents that flashpoint.

“This feels similar to open banking,” she says. “A once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape what credit looks like next.”

Infinian’s role sits upstream of traditional credit reference agencies, working with data contributors to harness credit application data, a dataset that has historically been underused.

This data provides:

• Statistical insight to strengthen affordability assessments
• Behavioural signals that help lenders split risk
• Operational efficiencies that reduce decisioning cost and friction

It’s not about replacing existing infrastructure but enhancing it. 

Innovation without breaking the system

One of the enduring tensions in credit is the balance between innovation and regulation. Risk professionals, by nature, value consistency and established CRAs have delivered that at scale.

“The current system works for the majority of people,” she says. “And consistency matters.”

But the CIMS review, and the move from SCOR to CIGB, indicates that it doesn’t work for everyone.

Rather than forcing radical change, Infinian’s strategy has been deliberately pragmatic: a “light-touch, high-value” solution that integrates ahead of the bureaus and focuses on what keeps lenders awake at night:

• Affordability 
• Credit Risk
• Cost pressure

Behind the scenes, Steeley’s focus has been on productising Infinian’s capabilities, making them scalable and repeatable.

The limits of traditional credit data

Credit data has always been backward-looking. That’s both its strength and its weakness. Traditionally focus has been on consistency and coverage, however, updates can lag by weeks, leaving lenders blind to fast-moving financial stress.

Newer datasets, open banking, rental data, and credit application behaviour, don’t replace this foundation. They complement it.

“People don’t apply for credit for fun,” Steeley notes. “They apply because they need to.”

That reality places a responsibility on the industry: data quality must be high, errors must be minimised, and insight must reflect lived financial experience, not just historical accounts.

Eligibility checks and the behavioural signals we miss

Eligibility checks have become an important consumer safeguard. They reduce unnecessary credit footprints but from a lender perspective, they often lack depth. What’s missing is behavioural context.

Infinian’s data reveals signals that traditional assessments often miss, including:

• Application velocity: how frequently a consumer has applied for credit recently
• Changes in loan purpose or amounts
• Patterns of financial stress emerging before arrears appear

These indicators allow lenders to:

• Say yes with greater confidence
• Say no earlier, and more responsibly
• Price risk more accurately

Crucially, this insight is drawn from self-declared application data, aggregated securely across contributors.

Real-time data and the future of financial inclusion

For Steeley, financial inclusion is not about expanding credit indiscriminately. It’s about correcting exclusions that no longer make sense. Rental data is a clear example. Paying rent reliably should not leave consumers invisible to the credit system.

Looking ahead, she sees real-time data as the single most important change the industry must deliver.

“Knowing instantly when someone takes out credit, how much it is, and at what rate, that’s the future.”

She acknowledges the reality of legacy systems and implementation costs. But the onus, she argues, is on technology providers to make integration as simple and frictionless as possible. All the components already exist - the task now is bringing them together.

A moment that matters

As competition increases in the CRA market and collaboration deepens between fintech’s and incumbents, Steeley is optimistic.

“This is a perfectly timed moment of coming together,” she says.

For an industry often defined by caution, the direction of travel is clear. Credit is becoming more dynamic, more behavioural, and, if done right, more human.

And for Emma Steeley and Infinian, that evolution is just getting started.


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