Worth Gives Banks and Financial Institutions the Power to Approve Small Businesses in Real Time with Decision Intelligence

Financial institutions working with small business applicants know this bottleneck well: the application is complete, the business looks creditworthy, and the file still sits in a review queue for days. Worth, the onboarding and underwriting platform trusted by the global top 1% of banks and financial institutions, launched Decision Intelligence to break that cycle.

Decision Intelligence combines verified identity data, network intelligence, risk signals, and configurable decision workflows to turn completed small business applications into real-time decisions. For banks, credit unions, and financial institutions underwriting business credit cards, funding, or new accounts, that means fewer files stuck waiting for manual resolution, more of the right businesses approved, and underwriting teams that can scale volume and the revenue that comes with it without scaling headcount.

The problem Decision Intelligence is built to solve

Much of the delay in small business lending isn't about credit risk; it's about identity. A business registered as "Premier Contracting LLC" may appear as "Premier Contracting" on its bank statements and "Premier Contracting Co." on a tax transcript. Each mismatch is a potential flag. 

Underwriters absorb that friction as work: requesting documents, re-keying the same figures across systems, and clearing alerts that turn out to be nothing. Multiply those alerts across thousands of applications and the queue grows fast, and the revenue those approvals represent keeps getting pushed out. 

Worth's patented Crosswalking Technology resolves those mismatches automatically, drawing on a database of more than 350 million verified business identities. When documentation is missing, the platform doesn't just flag it. It sources the data on the institution's behalf, resolves it, and cues Decision Intelligence to act, closing the gap in real time.

"We started Worth because we lived this problem ourselves. Even when small business owners are creditworthy, the system can't always see that clearly. Decision Intelligence gives our partners the data to move faster and the accuracy to decide better. When you reduce the noise in the decision, more capital flows to the businesses that should have had it all along, and to the institutions that are trying to serve them."

— Sal Rehmetullah, Worth CEO and Co-founder

What makes it different from other AI decisioning tools

Most AI deployments in financial services produce a recommendation and wait on a human underwriter to act on it; the recommendations require manual intervention. Decision Intelligence advances that standard. Banks and financial institutions define the parameters, and the platform acts within them — based on the institution's own underwriting playbook, applied check by check — returning an approval or denial instead of another item for the queue, with the reason for every outcome tied to the policy version in force when the decision was made. That frees valuable underwriting resources for more strategic work.

That shift matters at the volume levels banks are managing today. When the platform handles identity resolution and decisioning on clear cases, underwriting teams can focus on the complex ones that genuinely need judgment. The outcome isn't speed alone. Financial institutions can move more applications accurately through the pipeline, approve more of the right businesses, and pull that revenue forward without sacrificing decision quality.

CODI: the AI agent that explains in plain language

Automation without visibility is a compliance problem. Worth built a conversational platform agent, CODI — named for Continuous Decision Intelligence — to make sure every decision the platform reaches is traceable, explainable, and accessible in plain language.

CODI gives underwriters a real-time window into the decisioning process: 

• Why a specific case scored the way it did, 
• What documentation is still outstanding on an application, 
• And what changed on a monitored account since the last review. 

CODI surfaces a direct, sourced answer, not a dashboard interpretation, not a summary generated by another layer of AI.

That specificity is essential when a bank needs to explain a decision to a regulator, flag an anomaly in the portfolio, or train a new team member on why a file went the way it did. The answer has to be traceable all the way back to the data that drove it. CODI makes that possible without requiring a technical specialist to interpret the output.

Built for where financial services is going

Jacques Fu, Co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Worth, sees Decision Intelligence as the infrastructure that makes the next phase of lending workable.

"Decision Intelligence lets institutions make more accurate decisions faster, approving more of the right businesses and pulling revenue forward, while every agent stays inside defined guardrails, and every decision is auditable. It makes underwriting teams stronger and more equipped to scale approvals alongside this growing volume without sacrificing decision quality. Nothing like this has existed before, and it's going to change how small businesses and financial services operate forever." 

— Jacques Fu, Worth Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer 

Decision Intelligence isn't a replacement for underwriting judgment. It's the infrastructure that lets banks and financial institutions apply that judgment at scale, handle the volume that's already arriving, and capture the revenue that accurate, real-time decisioning makes possible.

As part of the launch celebration, Worth is hosting a happy hour in Atlanta on September 10th. Join the waitlist here. 

View the official press release here, or learn more and book a demo at worthai.com/decision-intelligence.