The case for a unified, real-time credit data network
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Tomás Campos is co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel, an agentic AI-powered credit data and payments platform.
As we close out 2025, the U.S. credit landscape is showing a mix of challenging trends. Consumers are eager to improve their financial situation, pay down debt, simplify credit accounts and lower payments. Yet banks, fintechs and financial institutions struggle to measure risk with inaccurate or missing data in credit profiles. Key macroeconomic indicators add another layer of complexity to the overall consumer financial health picture. The U.S. is facing rising consumer debt, rising delinquencies and increasingly fragmented, outdated credit data — and the system needs a real-time, unified way to understand consumer risk.
With macroeconomic pressures, inflation and other headwinds, the financial industry is staring into a credit risk abyss as growing debt meets lagging data in credit reports. The current state portrays an economy in which consumers continue to have access to credit products and borrow, yet the margin of safety that once cushioned households could be thinning.
According to the New York Federal Reserve’s Q3 2025 report, household debt increased by $197 billion, reaching $18.59 trillion. More concerning, aggregate delinquency rates remain elevated, with 4.5% of outstanding debt in some stage of delinquency and movement into more serious delinquency for auto loans and credit cards. VantageScore/CreditGauge found consumer credit delinquencies reached a five-year high early in 2025.
There are also new trends with less risky credit segments. Recent VantageScore data shows superprime and prime borrowers are starting to slip, with more than 90-day delinquencies rising among these less risky consumer groups. Yet TransUnion’s Q3 2025 Credit Industry Insights Report found more consumers landing in super prime and subprime credit risk tiers, two very different segments. Meanwhile, BNPL has drawn 91.5 million users in the U.S, creating “phantom debt” as many of these short-term loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus.
Complicating matters, the volume of consumer credit data across financial institutions and platforms makes it harder to keep profiles accurate and up to date. While open banking pushes real-time financial data to the forefront, liabilities data continues to lag. Both consumers and financial organizations are put into less-than-ideal positions with inaccurate and delayed data in credit profiles, much of which can be out of the consumer’s control to improve or fix. Given the growth in debt accounts, BNPL and delinquencies, real-time data is the only way to truly understand a consumer’s financial position.
Why we need a unified real-time network
Innovation to rewire the financial industry’s infrastructure is entering a new phase as APIs, agentic AI, tokenization and stablecoins move into the mainstream. To capitalize on this progress, the industry needs a unified vision for a credit ecosystem where financial players work together to support every consumer by connecting and verifying identity and data through a real-time network.
Network tokenization, in its simplest terms, is a single, unique, dynamic token that travels with the consumer, enabling financial organizations, fintechs, lenders and marketplaces to quickly access an accurate credit profile and open new ways to help consumers. Through dynamic smart tokens that securely share consumer-permissioned, verified identities, network tokenization enables trusted connections among members and seamless access to credit products and API data for more efficient, secure financial outcomes.
A few leading financial players are evolving this technology to fill the gap. Tokens and real-time data ensure financial organizations understand a customer’s risk and detect financial stress, like falling balances, delayed deposits or missed payments. As the technology accelerates, we will also see improvements in compliance monitoring, fraud detection and fair-lending assessments. Real-time data won’t solve growing consumer debt in the U.S., but it will tighten underwriting, mitigate risk exposure and improve fraud detection.
The bottom line: The sheer amount of credit data complicates how consumers and financial providers view, understand and manage credit profiles and products. With household debt growing, real-time consumer credit data via token networks turns static credit reporting into a continuous view of financial behavior and supports faster, fairer and safer decisions for financial organizations and consumers alike.
