Petal Raises New Funding and Spins Off Prism Data Unit

Petal has raised new funding and spun off its Prism Data unit.

The spinoff results in two independent FinTech companies that leverage open banking data to expand access to financial services for consumers without accurate credit scores, Petal said in a Wednesday (May 10) press release.

Petal will continue to serve customers directly by providing access to Visa credit cards issued by WebBank, the release said.

Prism Data, which has been Petal’s subsidiary focused on business-to-business (B2B) data infrastructure and analytics, will provide cash flow underwriting technology to financial institutions, FinTechs and other businesses that leverage it to build products and make credit decisions, per the release.

The $35 million in new funding, which includes strategic investments from Synchrony and Samsung Next, will be split between Petal and Prism Data.

Jason Rosen, the CEO and co-founder of both Petal and Prism Data, said in the release that the “first wave of FinTech” saw companies experiment, with some proving successful and others not.

“But for breakthrough technologies that have proven to be effective, like the cash flow underwriting we’ve developed at Petal and Prism Data, the time has come to expand to the mainstream,” Rosen said. “This has profound implications for financial inclusion, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with forward-thinking industry leaders like Synchrony and Samsung to drive true innovation at scale.”

Petal launched Prism Data in 2021 to make Petal’s cash flow-based underwriting technology available to other companies.

This technology can be used by financial providers to give credit to “consumers left out of the mainstream system,” the company said in an April 2021 press release.

“Prism Data is founded on the belief that open banking, and access to consumer-permissioned bank account transactional data, will change the way consumer finance works,” Petal said at the time.

PYMNTS research has found that the shift to open banking is forcing many industries to innovate quickly, as the ability to share data securely can drastically change the speed and accuracy of routine financial services.

Enterprises using open banking technology can execute more functions with fewer employees and possibly even branch out into new business areas, according to “The Guide to Open Banking: What Enterprise Customers Need to Know Now,” a PYMNTS and The Bank of London collaboration.